President Donald Trump is a danger to the world because he doesn’t listen and doesn’t know what he thinks he knows, John Bolton told the Texas Tribune Festival Nov. 13.
Bolton, former U.S. national security advisor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the first Trump administration, is among the host of former Trump staffers who have repeatedly warned Trump is not fit to serve as president.
Bolton was interviewed by historian Garrett Graff before a packed sanctuary at First Baptist Church of Austin, one of multiple sites for the three-day festival of ideas in downtown Austin, Texas.
“We just thought maybe he’d like to know a few things before he made decisions, and you just can’t really fully appreciate how little he knew about critically important subjects,” Bolton said. “He once asked John Kelly, when Kelly was chief of staff, ‘Is Finland still part of Russia?’
“We were visiting Theresa May, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom. She took him out to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence. … Just a few weeks before his visit, the Russians had attempted to poison two Russian exiles, … father and daughter who had broken with the regime and sought exile in the United Kingdom. And one of Theresa May’s advisers said, ‘We took that attack of poisoning very seriously. It was a chemical weapons attack by one nuclear power on another nuclear power.’ And Trump looked at Theresa May and said, ‘Oh, do you have nuclear weapons?’
“Trump looked at Theresa May and said, ‘Oh, do you have nuclear weapons?’”
“So when I say there’s some information gaps here that we were trying to deal with, they were real. He doesn’t want information. He wants to do what he wants to do, and he has people around him who are prepared to say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
Graff asked Bolton about the view of some conservatives back then that the “adults” in the room constrained Trump from his worst impulses.
“I started in April of 2018, so more than a year after Trump was sworn in,” he replied. “And part of the problem with the ‘axis of adults,’ as people called it back then, is they kept telling the press how much smarter they were than the president. And needless to say, he didn’t appreciate it.
“It made him more suspicious of others on his own team who weren’t trying to lead him down a garden path. They were just trying to make sure he had information and heard the arguments pro and con. You can be philosophically on the same page on an issue but have very different views on how to operationalize a policy, what the risks were, the predicate steps were to make the policy a success. That’s just part of government I think he never really saw.”
Bolton admitted many people have asked him why he went to work for Trump, knowing he was not suited for the role as president.
“Few people have ever called me naive. I thought I knew what I was getting into, but I was guided by the basic belief that like every one of his predecessors, Trump would be disciplined by the weight of the responsibilities he had, certainly in the national security space and by the gravity of the consequences that some of those decisions would imply that all of that significance would affect him, that would bring discipline to his thinking and he would make the final decisions.”
John Bolton speaks with historian Garrett Graff at the First Baptist Church during the 2025 Texas Tribune Festival on November 13 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
But that assumption turned out to be “completely wrong,” Bolton said. “Nothing disciplined his thinking in the first term it has not in the first year of the second term.”
One current evidence of Trump’s disconnection with reality is his appointment of Marco Rubio as national security advisor, secretary of state and archivist of the United States.
“This is a problem with the second Trump term that is going to have adverse consequences for the country as time goes on,” Bolton explained. “The National Security Council, and particularly the role of the national security advisor, is to strengthen the president’s hand over the bureaucracy. It’s so vast and so uncoordinated. It’s not because there’s some conspiracy in the Deep State to run the country. I mean, if there were a conspiracy, it would involve too many people; somebody would talk, we would know about it.”
He continued: “The Defense Department thinks differently from the Treasury Department or the State Department, and the point of the National Security Council is to bring things together. But Trump didn’t see it that way. He didn’t understand the need for coordination because he figured after all he would make all the decisions and he didn’t need to know that much to begin with.”
“He figured after all he would make all the decisions and he didn’t need to know that much to begin with.”
Bolton said he has great respect for Rubio but believes no single person can effectively hold two of the jobs he has, much less three.
“Only one person before has ever held both the national security advisor job and secretary of state, and that was Henry Kissinger,” he explained. And all due respect to Marco, he’s not Henry Kissinger. And even Henry Kissinger had to give it up after a while because other elements of the government said he’s not the president’s adviser, he’s the secretary of state and he’s pushing things in the direction he wants them to go in, which was absolutely true.”
This is yet another example of Trump’s lack of discipled thought, Bolton said. “This unwillingness to have a disciplined process reflects a mind that’s just not willing to be disciplined and is not focused on American national security. It’s focused on what the president wants to do at any given moment.”
Graff asked Bolton about a series of international issues, including the Hamas attack on Israel that sparked a retaliatory war waged by Israel and the Trump administration targeting alleged Venezuelan drug boats in the Caribbean.
Of shooting the boats out of the water, Bolton said, “What I sense is that there’s no underlying strategy here, and I think our failure to overthrow (President Nicolas) Maduro in the first term was our greatest failure and we owe it to ourselves and the Venezuelan people to get it right this time. And we’re not right now doing that. It’s not too late to correct it, but right now there’s just no comprehension, I think, of what it takes to replace the Maduro regime, which would be in our national security interest and in the interest of the Venezuelan people.”
Of the Hamas attack on Israel, Bolton said it is Iran that is the “existential threat” to Israel and who was behind the Hamas surprise attack.
“We’ve tried a variety of ways for a long period of time to convince the ayatollah not to build nuclear weapons. We’ve never succeeded with any of it. So it finally came in the wake of October 7 — which really the attack on Israel was part of a larger Iranian strategy. They themselves called it the Ring of Fire strategy to sponsor terrorist groups all around Israel, Hamas and the Gaza Strip.”
Bolton explained: “And this was really aimed ultimately at weakening or destroying Israel. So it shouldn’t have come to anybody as a surprise that at some point Israel said, ‘We’re going to go after Iran. … The source of October 7 was Iran. So I think the attack on the nuclear program by the Israelis was correct. I think the U.S. should have joined it at the beginning, and I think the problem with it was that it ended too soon and we can see already that Iran is trying to rebuild, recreate the nuclear weapons program. We damaged it significantly. We could have done a lot more. We should have done a lot more.”