John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Donald J. Trump and a longtime foreign policy hawk, said Monday he is ready to enter the 2024 presidential race if he doesn’t see enough pushback within the Republican Party to his recent call on Trump to abandon the US Constitution. .
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet The Press Now,” Bolton said he was concerned about Trump’s social media post over the weekend, in which the 2020 underdog said he should be reinstated as president or to get new elections because he felt there was fraud.
“Massive fraud of this type and magnitude warrants the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote. He reissued the statement later in the day.
The US Constitution does not provide for the reinstatement of a sitting president who loses to the White House or the restoration of quadrennial general elections, and experts said there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
“I think that to run for president, you can’t just say, ‘I support the Constitution.’ You have to say, ‘I would stand up to people who might undermine that,'” Bolton told NBC News’ Kristen Welker.
He then invoked with approval the since-disbanded House Un-American Activities Committee, considered by many historians to be the epicenter of the anti-communist paranoia of the post-World War II Red Scare and a harbinger of the demagogic rise of Senator Joe McCarthy in the early 1980s. .
“You know, I used they have a thing in the House of Representatives called the House Un-American Activities Committee. I think when you challenge the Constitution itself, as Trump has done, it’s un-American.”
Bolton served under Trump as national security adviser for just over a year, from spring 2018 to fall 2019. But his tenure may be best known for how it intersected with the first impeachment attempt and impeachment of Trump, resulting from Trump’s attempt. suspends aid to Ukraine to pressure the country’s president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden.
Bolton was asked to testify in the impeachment trial what he knew about the plan but refused at, citing an ongoing dispute between him and the National Security Council over whether his then-unreleased memos contained classified information. Critics saw his move as a ploy, and when the book came out, Bolton said he and other senior officials had repeatedly tried to get Trump to release aid, but that Trump had refused.
Bolton’s decision not to testify was heavily criticized as a cash purchase increase sales of your book.
Bolton was also a key figure in the George W. Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 while he was secretary of state for arms control and international security. He also flirted with a run for president in 2012, but ultimately dropped out.
“In fact, I think most elected Republicans in Washington disagree with Trump on this, but they are intimidated. This is when there is strength in numbers. The more people tell the truth, the easier it is for everybody else,” he told Welker on Monday.
Bolton said he would seek “Shermanesque” statements of opposition to Trump’s position from potential 2024 GOP candidates before deciding whether to run.
“If I don’t see it, then I will seriously consider joining,” he said. “This is serious business.”
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