Former President Donald Trump has ended up with a new enemy proactively seeking to hinder his 2024 presidential candidacy – and a former ally and aide at that.
This comes as his ex-National Security Advisor John Bolton has stated he’s mulling his own White House run if that would hurt Trump’s election chances.
Ex-Ally-Turned-Enemy Fumes after Trump’s Controversial Constitution Call
74-year-old John Bolton, a former US Ambassador to the United Nations and two years Donald Trump’s senior, served as the then-president’s top national security official for a year-and-a-half – between April 2018 and September 2019.
Bolton is widely deemed a foreign policy hawk. He resigned his post on September 10, 2019, as disagreements between him and the president piled up, and has since been a vocal Trump critic in media appearances and in a book he published in 2020.
Former President Donald Trump announced his new White House bid on November 15 and is presently deemed the most likely winner of the 2024 presidential nomination of the GOP despite a potential challenge by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
In an NBC News interview on Monday, Bolton declared he was mulling his own White House run and didn’t hide his motivation about it. Namely, to try to hurt Trump’s chances of getting the Republican nomination or getting elected.
The former US National Security Advisor made it clear he was outraged by the former president’s recent comments about the possibility of terminating election rules in the US Constitution because of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
In a series of posts on Truth Social over the weekend, Trump suggested “terminating” the constitutional rules on elections after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, revealed the scale of Joe Biden-favoring censorship ahead of the 2020 election, when the platform deleted stories about Hunter Biden’s shocking laptop materials at the direction of the Democrats.
John Bolton thinks he can stop Trump in the primaries 😆 pic.twitter.com/9fIWZWLgDe
— Tex_2A (@Tex2_A) December 6, 2022
BREAKING: Fmr. Nat’l Security Adviser John Bolton is considering a 2024 presidential run if it would prevent fmr. President Trump from taking office again.
Bolton: “You can’t simply say, ‘I support the Constitution.’ You have to say, ‘I would oppose people who undercut it.’” pic.twitter.com/Twy8pluMYT
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) December 5, 2022
GOP ‘Intimidated’ by Trump?
In his TV interview, Trump’s former ally John Bolton said his decision to enter the 2024 White House race was conditional on whether enough GOP figures “set up and condemn” what he saw as the ex-president’s “attack” on the US Constitution.
Bolton blasted other potential Republican presidential candidates for “simply saying” that they “support the Constitution.” Instead, he argued, they should be opposing and denouncing Trump or anyone else trying to “undercut it.
Trump’s newfound enemy insisted he would “absolutely” join the GOP White House contest unless other Republicans had the guts to condemn the 45th president of the United States.
“This is serious business,” Bolton declared, stressing that the Republicans already have one “declared” presidential candidate who “doesn’t believe” in the American Constitution.
The former National Security Advisor said his timetable would be “pretty short” if he ran for president.
No one is going to vote for John Bolton!https://t.co/bP64dmFPsv
— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) December 6, 2022
Bolton Slams Trump
He argued that Donald Trump’s views were “out of step” with the bulk of the Republican Party.
In his words, 95% of the GOP voters would consider the Constitution “more important” than the former president. Bolton did note, though, he was “afraid” some Republicans out there would still “stick with Trump on this.”
The ex-National Security Advisor claimed that most Republican politicians in Washington, DC, actually disagree with POTUS 45 “on this” – “but they are intimidated.”
That is why, he insisted, it was crucial for as many people as possible to speak out and “tell the truth.”
