‘He Thinks He and Putin Are Friends’: John Bolton on How Trump Gets Manipulated
Trump’s former national security adviser lets loose on the leaked Signal group chat and Trump’s foreign policy.
By Rachael Bade
Much of Washington is still waiting anxiously to learn who — if anyone — will be fired over the embarrassment now known as Signalgate. But the real battle underneath it all is which conservative faction will define Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
Will it be old school hawks like national security adviser Michael Waltz, who made the mistake of inviting Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into the chat, or America First types like Vice President JD Vance, who expressed skepticism about the strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
One person who is no stranger to bureaucratic knife-fighting in a Trump administration is John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term before having an ugly falling out with the president.
In an interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, Bolton discussed Signal disclosures, Trump’s approach to Vladimir Putin and what it’s like to be the subject of the president’s personal vendettas.
A longtime national security hawk, Bolton also had some choice words for Vance, who grumbled on Signal about the American military being needed to open up shipping lanes for Europeans.
The United States has been committed to “freedom of the seas” since the days of Thomas Jefferson, Bolton said. “It’s all out there, just open a book.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive Producer Kara Tabor and Senior Producer Alex Keeney.
Within hours of being sworn in, Trump revoked your Secret Service protection despite the Iranians having a price on your head. What is it like to know five years after your falling out with him that he’s still thinking about you on his first day back in the White House?
Well, I’m glad to be on his mind. I guess that’s the only thing I can say.
It obviously had an effect on me and the others whose security protection he canceled, but the bigger effect is on the U.S. itself. When foreign adversaries think that senior American officials — former or present — can be exposed if they fall out with Donald Trump, that tells them something about our vulnerability and it tells his current senior advisers something about their vulnerability too. This is not the way to run a railroad.
Do you fear for your life now without that security? Have you had to pay for private security?
I’m making arrangements, the specifics of which I won’t get into. But this is not chatter on the internet. This threat — not just to myself, but including Trump and [Mike] Pompeo, [Mark] Esper, [Mark] Milley and others — is a conclusion of years of watching the Iranians and pretty solid information about the nature of the threat. I don’t think the Iranians give up easily. They were after Trump just before the election. Charges were filed against [someone] trying to hire a hitman against Trump himself in the period before the election, which is pretty brazen. So it continues to be current, no doubt about it.
Let’s talk about Signalgate. When you were national security adviser, how often did you put highly sensitive attack plans into a Signal chat with a reporter?
Well, I didn’t use Signal then and, you know, I took a pretty simplistic approach to things.
I was being sarcastic, by the way.
I would say that there are two kinds of communication when you’re in one of these senior administration positions. There’s communications over the government-secure telecommunications network on which we have spent billions of dollars and decades of effort to make impenetrable by our adversaries. So there’s that option, and then there is every other option and every other option is not acceptable.
How does a well-oiled national security apparatus conduct business on a weekend when you’re not in the office? The excuse the White House has given is, “Oh, everybody was sort of everywhere. We weren’t in the office.” It sounds like that’s not an excuse.
Look, if you want a group chat, there’s a place for it: It’s called the Situation Room. And if it’s Saturday or Sunday, that’s too damn bad, isn’t it? The United States is about to engage in using military force. You got something else more important in mind?
Number two, with a few exceptions on that list — like Steve Witkoff, whose presence is inexplicable to me — but for the secretary of State, secretary of Defense, director of National Intelligence, director of the CIA, national security adviser, they are never more than an arm’s length away from secure telecommunications. I had that kind of capability built into my house. I had a SCIF built in my basement by the National Security Council staff. All these people are receiving protection of one kind or another. They have secure phones in the vehicles they travel in. They have secured communications on their desks. It’s just inconceivable.
Let’s talk about the fallout. You know better than anyone that there’s two things Trump hates the most. Number one, he hates an embarrassing headline — anything that makes him look bad, he doesn’t like it. But he also hates giving longtime critics a win.
So far, we have seen that his concern about his critics getting a win by firing someone has protected Michael Waltz. But at what point do you think that embarrassment to him becomes the thing that’s most important?
It’s the former that’s most important. If he thinks he’s suffering political damage as a result of this, then I think the risk to everybody involved goes up, both holding onto their jobs and also the risk of real investigation. I think as long as Donald Trump doesn’t feel the heat, nobody will be investigated for anything and they won’t lose their jobs, at least in the short term. But the second metric at work is, what has all this done to Trump’s view of the people themselves? How much of this does he take before he says it’s not worth the risk down the road?
Now, that isn’t going to happen this week or next week or the week after. But we had [Pete] Hegseth earlier in an incident with Elon Musk, somebody maybe inviting Musk to the Pentagon for a briefing on the China war plan. Remember that war plan?
I do.
Trump specifically said later that he didn’t think that anybody should receive a briefing on the China war plan. That’s the correct position. And he said, almost gratuitously, “You know Elon has a lot of business in China. That could be a conflict of interest.”
Well, indeed, it could be a conflict of interest. And that was another signal. He didn’t like that at all. So I think Hegseth already had one strike against him. The Signal chat issue may be two strikes against him. But at some point, I do think people become vulnerable. But no action will be taken until a couple months from now at the earliest, when suddenly they’ll find some very attractive way to spend more time with their family.
It’s interesting that you brought up Pete Hegseth because some people have been surprised that all the focus has been on Michael Waltz. We talk to people in the White House, and the anger is not at Hegseth. I can tell you that for certain from my own conversations, it’s all focused on Waltz. And yet it was Pete Hegseth who put this sensitive information about strikes and timetables into the chat.
What can we take away from the fact that people close with Donald Trump are not talking about Hegseth? And in fact, I think the president said yesterday, “Pete did nothing wrong. This was all Mike.” What do you make of that?
Well, I think it says Waltz is more vulnerable and I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Everybody on that Signal group chat had a responsibility to protect government secrets and the daddy on that chat, the highest ranking official, was the vice president.
Waltz may have started it, but everybody else allowed it to go on. Hegseth has said in his defense that, “Well, I had a duty to keep these people informed.” No, he didn’t. The secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, doesn’t need to know when the second F-18 strike group is about to take off. The only other person, I think, other than Hegseth himself who should have been kept up to date moment-to-moment was Waltz, because he might have to tell the president or he might have to notify somebody else.
Is it true though that the secretary of Defense can declassify things on a whim? Do Trump officials have any sort of leg to stand on on this idea that if he decides this is not classified, it is therefore not classified?
If in terms of a defense against a criminal prosecution, if it’s not classified that may have something to do with it. But remember, the fascination with “Did they violate the law?” as opposed to “Did they just do something that no reasonable person should have done?” distracts from the real issue, which is potentially putting American service members in jeopardy.
I would say: Remember what that iconic French statesman the Marquis de Talleyrand was once said to have said: “It’s worse than a crime. It’s a mistake.” And that’s what this whole thing was, a mistake.
To go back to this notion of who’s the more vulnerable fall guy here, Hegseth or Waltz, how much of this is part of an ongoing civil war happening in the Republican Party right now? You have some who are more Reaganite, more hawkish types like Michael Waltz, like Marco Rubio.
And then you have a restrainer branch. The MAGA, America First faction of the GOP. Do you think that faction is putting the blame on Waltz to try to push him out?
I’ve read some of your reporting on it. I really think it’s pretty much one-sided, more by the pro-Russia faction within the MAGA movement against what you might call the Reaganite, the more traditional foreign policy wing. And they’re just obsessed with finding remnants of prior Republican administrations and purging them. I think the more Reaganite people are just trying to do their job, but it shows fundamentally that if that is a description, how non-serious these isolationists, neo-isolationists are and how they don’t understand really how much is at stake.
Do you have confidence that Waltz is going to be somebody who pushes back on this America First, isolationist wing of the party? And if so, do you want him not to resign?
Well, if I said I thought he should stay, that might hurt him. So you know the old saying in politics, “I’ll be for you or against you, whichever does you more good.”
I just think at this point, the only issue for Donald Trump is whether he’s being hurt. And I don’t see that he’s suffering harm at the moment. It could be that polls will show that there is harm. But that doesn’t mean that in his mind, many of the actors in this particular drama have really used up a lot of their political capital and are on very thin ice with him down the road.
If we didn’t already know it from Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference a couple weeks ago, we certainly learned it from the Signal chain that he has a lot of disdain for Europe. He made it clear he thought that intervening with the Houthis was bailing Europe out.
Can you speak to what’s behind this animus that JD Vance has for Europe? Obviously you disagree with it, right?
Well, I can’t explain what is motivating Vance, but I do think that it reflects a very primitive view of international relations. And really, not that dissimilar from Trump, where everything is a matter of dollars and cents. There’s no appreciation for what a collective security, collective defense organization like NATO is and what it gives the United States — how it benefits the United States.
I think in part, we’re suffering from 35 years post-end of the Cold War, where we’ve had inadequate expression of why America has strategic interests all around the world and why we need to protect them, why a forward American policy benefits us. We’ve heard too much, frankly, from liberals about how we’re doing this for the sake of democracy around the world. And in fact, that’s not correct. We’re doing this in substantial part because it’s in our interest to do it, that whatever minimal amount of order there is in the world benefits us. It’s true that many of our allies don’t bear their fair share of the burden, but we’re not doing this for them. We’re doing it for us. And if we don’t do it for us, nobody else is going to do it for us.
Take the Yemen situation, where the Houthis have blocked the critical Suez Canal, Red Sea maritime passage. And while it’s true that most of the trade that goes through that is between Europe and some other part of the world, it has been a bedrock principle of American foreign policy that we believed in freedom of the seas. And a little secret for those who don’t know it: The seas extend everywhere. They’re all connected, ultimately. When we see a violation of freedom of the seas, we have, throughout our history, acted to end it no matter how big other people’s interest in it were.
A little history for JD Vance: Thomas Jefferson in his first term fought the Barbary Pirates on the coast of North Africa. This is where the line in the Marines’ Hymn comes from: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” — that’s Thomas Jefferson in 1801 to 1805, because the Europeans paid tribute to the Barbary Pirates, extortion money we would call it today, and Jefferson said, “We’re not going to pay tribute.” Stephen Decatur became a great American hero by his actions there on the shores of North Africa. That’s not very far away from the Red Sea. And Jefferson did that at the beginning of the 19th century for freedom of the seas for America.
The first American naval squadron in the Pacific was in the 1820s. We didn’t even have states on the Pacific Ocean. We have been an international maritime power from the beginning. The first ship from America that went to China, called the Empress of China, was commissioned in 1783, the year of the Treaty of Versailles granting our independence.
So I would say to the vice president, if you want a little lesson in freedom of the seas and American policy, it’s all out there, just open a book.
You have talked about how the happiest you ever saw President Trump was when he was at a state dinner with Queen Elizabeth. He’s not in the same place as Vance. He talks about NATO in terms of other countries needing to put more money into NATO, but he’s not out there saying, “Oh, we’re going to blow the whole thing up,” at least not at this point.
Do you think that he’s going to end up in the same place that JD Vance is?
I don’t think Trump thinks in conceptual terms, so there are parts of Europe he likes and parts of Europe he doesn’t like. Keir Starmer made a very astute move in his first visit by bringing an invitation from King Charles for another state visit. And as I said, as you said, I’ve never seen Trump happier than in his white tie at the dinner with Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace. And I have to say it was quite an occasion. But another white tie dinner with King Charles this time, fantastic. Other monarchies in Europe should do the same.
He was thrilled to be invited to the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral by President Macron, even before Trump was inaugurated. He was a builder, so he knows about cathedrals and things like that. There are ways to get to Trump that the Europeans need to think about. I don’t think it occurs to Vance that that might be a problem for him.
We’ve got to talk about Ukraine and Russia here. Trump’s art of the deal clearly is to sort of entice Putin to the table with a carrot and try to force Zelenskyy to the table with a bat. Is there a charitable explanation for why Trump is showing so much deference to Russia and treating Ukraine so harshly?
Trump views international relations through the prism of his personal relations with foreign leaders. So he thinks that if he has good relations with Putin, then the U.S. has good relations with Russia. That’s not true, but that’s what he thinks. He thinks he and Putin are friends.
By contrast, he has not had a good relationship with Zelenskyy since the famous “perfect phone call” of 2019 that led to his first impeachment. So therefore, he thinks that if he gives his friends some advantages like all the concessions he’s already made on Ukraine, that will help bring peace. He wants this war behind him. He thinks it’s Biden’s war. He said during the campaign, it never would have happened had he been president.
Putin doesn’t think they’re friends. He thinks Trump is an easy mark. And he thinks he’s manipulable. And he has been manipulating him as when Putin said several weeks ago, “You know, Trump was right that if he had been president, there wouldn’t have been a war in Ukraine”. Well, maybe so, maybe not. But Trump loved to hear that. Then they released the hostage, Mark Foley. Then [Aleksandr] Lukashenko and Belarus released another American hostage. This is the manipulation at work.
Now, I think Putin’s got to be very careful that he doesn’t overstep it here and risk losing some of the concessions that Trump has made. Trump made a statement [Wednesday] that indicated maybe he thought Putin was slow rolling things. So it’s not inevitable that Putin’s going to get everything that he wants. He could make a mistake, but the odds are in his favor now. And I think he does want to slow roll things because he believes momentum on the battlefield is flowing in his direction.
What do you make of Trump’s posture toward China? He’s talked for a long time about being tough on China. But then he delayed the TikTok law enforcing that ban without divestment.
There were a number of Republicans on the Hill who were super pissed that the administration took out this provision in a spending bill in December that would have culled American investment in China. What do you make of his position right now — or can you even really define it?
Well, I think he blames China for his loss of the 2020 election because of Covid.
But beyond that, going back to his first term, he wants at some point to negotiate the biggest trade deal in human history with China. So if you look at a very tumultuous opening two months, while tariff measures have been traded back and forth by China and the United States, it’s been relatively quiet compared to a lot of other fronts. And I think Xi Jinping is waiting to see a little bit better what Trump is going to do and I think Trump, hoping for this opportunity to do the biggest trade deal in history, has not been willing to turn the heat on yet.
I think it’s a huge mistake. I don’t care whether they sell TikTok or not, it ought to be banned in this country. It’s an arm of Chinese intelligence. Doesn’t matter what’s on the platform. It’s a vacuum cleaner of American habits and actions that entirely benefit China.
Do you think that China has the upper hand on TikTok because the president is not going to want to go through with getting rid of it?
Yeah. It’s unbelievable. He was against TikTok before it helped him in the election.
This is the epitome of Donald Trump. If it’s good for me, I’m for it. If it’s not good for me, I am against it.
Obviously you’ve been very critical of President Trump and his current foreign policy, but I’m wondering if there is anything you think he’s doing right on the global stage right now?
I think the closing of the southern border seems to be going very well. He’s not doing what he wants to do in terms of deportation. He may never be able to, but it turns out he was able to close the border in the first term and he’s doing it again now because the principle of deterrence works against illegal immigrants too. If they think they’re going to walk across Central America and Mexico and get to the Rio Grande and not get in, they’re sensible enough not to leave their homes to begin with.
I think most Americans favor more immigration, but that we should pick who comes in. So he’s got himself a victory on that score. I don’t think there’s any question about it.
