IRAQ/JOHN BOLTON/MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Now, I don’t know what Bolton has said [in his forthcoming book]. I haven’t seen it yet.
But Bolton is a disgruntled guy who made tremendous mistakes. He was one of the architects of the Middle East policy. And the only thing I liked about Bolton was that everybody thought he was crazy… He never saw a war he didn’t like. He made a tremendous mistake. You know, he and the people that he was pushing, when he went into the Middle East, when he went into Iraq That was a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction. That was John Bolton….
But I view him as a disgruntled employee. Very unhappy. Hated to leave. He was basically a man who was not happy to be leaving. Was not happy to be leaving. He had a lot of policy disputes, he and I.
And after the first month or so, you know, I asked him one question. I said, ‘So, do you think you did the right thing by going into Iraq?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ And that’s when I lost him. And that was early on. That’s when I lost him. But no, I disagreed with much of the stuff he said.”
-Donald Trump in a June 17, 2020 interview as quoted by WSJ Staff, “Transcript of President Trump’s Interview With The Wall Street Journal,” wsj.com, June 18, 2020