White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Thursday went after former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, telling Fox News that Bolton’s upcoming bombshell memoir on his time in Trumpworld is nothing more than “deep swamp revenge porn.”
Multiple media outlets received advanced copies of Bolton’s book this week and reported that the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations claims, among other things, that the president sought reelection help from China and expressed support for the Chinese government’s use of internment camps.
With President Donald Trump railing against Bolton and the administration attempting to prevent the book’s release, Navarro was asked by America’s Newsroom co-anchor Sandra Smith to respond to the Justice Department’s complaint that the book contains classified information.
ADVERTISEMENT
Calling the ex-Trump official “Big Lie Bolton”—an obvious reference to Trump’s claims that Bolton’s book is “full of lies”—Navarro insisted that the one-time Fox News pundit “literally begged” to be national security adviser.
“But the minute he got in here, what he did in that building right over there was set up the national security office as an autonomous zone with him literally as the warlord,” Navarro declared, adding that Bolton was “good at acquiring turf but he had no clue what to actually do with it.”
Navarro went on to say there was a “repeatable pattern” in Bolton’s behavior, noting that the “big lie” that Bolton told during his Bush administration tenure was that there were weapons of destruction in Iraq, likening that claim to what Bolton was doing to the Trump administration.
“And then when he left the Bush administration, what did he do? He did the same kind of revenge porn,” Navarro continued. “This is deep swamp revenge porn on the part of John Bolton.”
Co-anchor Ed Henry, somewhat taken aback, asked: “You’re calling it revenge porn?”
“It’s the deep swamp political equivalent of revenge porn,” Navarro confirmed. “The guy got fired because he didn’t obey the chain of command because he was out of touch with what President Donald J. Trump stands for in terms of foreign policy.”
As Navarro continued to fire away at Bolton, Henry interjected and pointed out that Bolton’s central charge is that Trump is unfit for office, prompting Navarro to exclaim that Trump “is the greatest president we’ve ever had in modern history on the economy” before lambasting Bolton some more.
Smith, meanwhile, noted that critics would rightly ask why Trump hired in Bolton in the first place if he were so incompetent, causing Navarro to once again say Bolton “begged” for the job and Trump was willing to give him a second chance.
“He comes in here in his seersucker summer suits and with his big mustache,” Navarro seethed. “And I was in a staff meeting one time and he walked in and he was absolutely giddy at the prospect of a coup in Venezuela. I think to myself, wait a minute. This is a serious, serious matter and he is giddy. There’s something wrong with that dude!”
“A lot to unpack there,” Henry reacted while concluding the interview.
