Former National Security Adviser John Bolton said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that former President Donald Trump had “simple-minded ideas about how the world works.”
Bolton said, “I think it’s important to understand, and this is especially important for Trump critics to understand, he doesn’t have a philosophy. He doesn’t think in policy terms, as that’s conventionally understood in Washington. He thinks in anecdotal, ad hoc, transactional terms, seeing through the prism of how does this benefit Donald Trump.”
He continued, “He has simple-minded ideas about how the world works. He thinks, for example, he said it quite explicitly, if he has good relations with the head of the foreign state, if he has good relations with Vladimir Putin, then the United States has good relations with that nation. That’s nonsense. Personal relations have their place in foreign affairs, as in everything else, but the hard men of countries like China and Russia know what their national interests are, and they pursue them. Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue.”
Bolton added, “He doesn’t fundamentally understand alliances. He thinks we’re defending the Europeans, and they won’t pay us. He doesn’t understand that mutual security means everybody is more secure and that there’s strength in alliances. Alliances can be a pain in the neck to manage, but if they serve the national security interests, as ours do, NATO in particular. To get out of it will cause negative consequences for the United States you can’t even imagine.”
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