Trump tears into his ‘stupid’ former aide Bolton, says he ‘blew up the Middle East’
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President takes aim at two top supporters of his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign towards Iran. Donald Trump unleashed a tirade against former aide John Bolton on Wednesday as he increasingly signals that he will back away from Washington’s center-right foreign policy establishment.
![[Donald Trump stripped his former adviser’s security detail away with one of his first acts as president]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/22/20/TRUMP-ENEMIGOS_85183.jpg)
The president was asked about his day-one decision to strip a federal protective detail from Bolton, who served as his national security adviser early on in his first term in the White House. Trump went on an extended rant about Bolton, whom he claimed “blew up the Middle East” with his support of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during the second Bush administration.
“I thought he was a very dumb person, but I used him well because every time people saw me come into a meeting with John Bolton standing behind me, they thought that he'd attack them because he was a warmonger,” the president told a reporter who asked about the decision to strip Bolton’s security detail. “He's the one that got us involved ... convinced Bush, which was a terrible decision, to blow up the Middle East. We blew up the Middle East, and we left.”.
Trump added: “We got nothing out of it except a lot of death. We killed a lot of people, and John Bolton was one of those guys, a stupid guy.". As for Bolton’s protection, Trump said: “I think there was enough time. We take a job, you take a job, you want to do a job, we’re not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives. Why should we?”.
