Putin says very nice things about me.
I think that's very nice.
President Xi is a terrific guy.
I like being with him a lot,
and he's a very special person.
Putin declares a big portion
of the Ukraine, of Ukraine.
Putin declares it as independent.
I said, how smart is that?
We're like a rocket ship.
It was like a rocket ship sent by Kim Jong
Un.
He's not so fond of this administration,
but he's fond of me.
And we had a very good relationship.
Valentine's Day coming up. Find someone who looks at you
like Donald Trump looks at,
well, any authoritarian leader. Trump's love of dictators is no
secret,
and he claims they love him,
too. You heard him in that last clip there as
part of his case for why he should be elected
to a second term.
But he might be mistaken about just why they love
him so much.
Here's John Bolton, his former national security adviser,
and why dictators have praised Trump so much.
I don't think they are really friendly with Donald Trump.
I think they think Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin,
Kim Jong Un and others.
They think he's a laughing fool and they're fully prepared
to take advantage of him.
Trump's self absorption makes it impossible for him to understand
that
you aren't already terrified about the implications of a second
Trump term In a new book,
Bolton cautioning quote in no arena of American affairs has
the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security.
A short attention span except for personal advantage renders coherent
foreign policy almost unattainable.
I believed before becoming National Security Advisor that the gravity
of Trump's international policy responsibilities would discipline even him.
I was obviously wrong. If his first four years were
bad,
a second for will be worse.
Joining our conversation, Senior correspondent at Vox and author of
The Agenda,
How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America,
Ian Milhiser. Paul is also here with us.
I mean, to say he was wrong is a little
bit of an understatement there,
Paul, but let's go to the caution about a second
term.
Pretty alarming stuff, yes. I mean,
President Mayhem 2.0 is alarming,
especially given the state of affairs in the world that
we just covered and you cover every single week.
I mean, Trump is the number one national security threat
for America.
I think we've been talking about on this show for
years.
Insiders are recognizing it, but I also think America is
starting to recognize it.
And the stakes are different this time.
And I think New Hampshire is a bit of a
caution for Trump.
You saw independence in particular,
leave him and go to Nikki Haley.
I think that will reflect in the general election in
November as well.
When independents look at this global landscape and they say
we need stability,
we need a calm head.
We need someone who's not reckless and potentially collaborating with
dictators.
I may not like Biden,
but he's better than that.
I think this is starting to add up on him,
and I think it's going to hurt him in the
general significantly,
especially because you got to listen to Trump in his
own words to hear what it is he plans to
do.
John Bolton points out that Trump is focused on dismantling
the administrative state
or the career federal employees Trump believes obstructed his agenda
when he was president.
If Trump were to be successful,
right, what would that then mean from a foreign policy
perspective?
How would our allies, how would our adversaries look at
us?
So I think that what Trump wants to do is
take the United States government,
which is supposed to act in the interest of the
American people,
and that has all sorts of systems in place to
make sure that it does.
So even if one official isn't,
you know, is selfishly motivated
and dismantle all of that.
And, you know, I think the biggest challenge facing people
like me who believe that a second Trump term would
be uniquely dangerous is that there was a first Trump
term. And while it was bad,
it did not end in Trump's brown shirts rounding us
all up and putting us in camps.
But the reason why I think the second term will
be different is,
first of all, he'll be emboldened.
He will have beaten all of his legal challenges.
Second of all, he will be surrounded by sycophants.
You know you have groups like the Heritage Foundation that
are actively trying to recruit Trumpy people to make sure
that he doesn't have people as advisors like John Bolton
who all very conservative were ultimately not Trump sycophants.
And 3rd the courts are going to be much more
friendly than Trump.
You know, when Trump took office,
he still had a Supreme Court that was moderately conservative.
That would strike down a lot of what he does.
Now he has an extremely conservative Supreme Court and for
each day that he spends in office,
he can put more sycophants on the on the federal
bench.
Call a democracy expert. We often have on this show.
Ruth Bengiat posted this on social media.
Quote, Bolton is correct, but he also opted to work
for someone he knew had those sympathies.
Why not interview experts on authoritarianism who did not work
for authoritarians?
That is also a plug on my part to buy
Ruth
Bengiat's book Strong Men from Mussolini to the Present.
I think implicit in there though is this question of
will anyone listen right?
Are there Republicans who will listen to a John Bolton
because he did serve in the administration?
Yes, I think there are.
And folks think there may be no more reasonable Republicans.
But they are out there and there are moderates and
there are young people who are voting for the first
time.
And there are independents that are
49% of the country right now that tend to focus
on national security issues and tend to consider themselves patriots.
And if you can just move a couple thousand of
them in Ohio and other key swing states,
that may be the difference in who the next commander
in chief is.
So I do think you have to double down on
that.
At the same time, you've got the sycophants falling in
line,
You've got to Santos and the others who we now
see are just going to fall in line behind him
and give him that momentum.
So yes, I don't think you give up the fight
on that middle because the middle is the key battle
zone in all of this.
In earlier in that interview,
John Bolton pointed out that there were by some chance
there were relatively few international crises that arose requiring an
American response during Trump's presidency.
Now Putin has invaded Ukraine,
we are on the edge of a wider war in
the Middle East.
Begs the question, what would all that mean then if
Donald Trump were president again?
Well, we did have one huge International Crisis under Donald
Trump.
We had the COVID-19 pandemic.
And you know, my recollection was that Trump spent it
telling us to do things like inject ourselves with bleach.
So, you know, we know how he responded to that
crisis.
I think ultimately what we need,
I mean there's a name for the kind of coalition
we need to build to beat Donald Trump and is
a Popular Front.
And that means that you need everyone in the United
States who agrees,
who believes in democracy regardless of whether they're liberal or
conservative.
They're Democrats or Republicans. If there's someone like John Bolton
who have done terrible things in the past for this
moment does not matter.
We need everyone to join this Popular Front who wants
to,
you know, who wants to make sure that our democracy
is
is preserved. That includes people who disagree with Joe Biden
from the left.
You know, because, again, he is the only vehicle to
preserve American democracy
right now. And then once we get through this present
crisis,
once we get through this authoritarian threat,
then the Popular Front can splinter and we can return
to our ordinary politics.
Well, Paul Bolton tried to claim that America was equally
safe or unsafe under either a Trump or a Biden
presidency.
That would seem to undermine the credibility of his argument.
Yes. I mean, I'm not,
you know, putting personally a lot of of of stake
in what John Bolton says.
But I think there are some people who are moved
by him.
And I think the question is,
can the Democrats and can all those forces that oppose
Trump weaponize it in some way?
We talked on this show in months past about Chris
Christie.
Could he take chunks out of Trump overtime?
Trump is like Godzilla, you know,
rampaging our future and rampaging our democracy.
So I think it's right that we have to align
every opponent to him to try to take him down.
And if you can take little pieces off of his
voting base,
if you can take pieces away from his earned media,
if you can take pieces away from his electoral votes,
you got to do it because the margin may be
so small that that's the difference.