John Bolton said that while he didn’t hear President Trump disparage the military during a 2018 trip to France, he called the remarks “despicable” if true.
“These comments are despicable. If he made them, they are despicable,” Trump’s former national security adviser told Bloomberg on Friday.
The Atlantic published a story on Thursday citing four anonymous sources who claimed that during the 2018 visit, Trump referred to dead soldiers as “losers” and called dead Marines “suckers.” The Associated Press later confirmed the veracity of the claims. Several people in the Trump administration, both current and former, have soundly denied the report.
Bolton’s controversial book about his time in the Trump administration, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, does not make the same claims in the Atlantic article, although he admitted that it is still possible Trump made the comments when he was not around. Bolton said that if he had heard Trump disparage the military, he would have included it in his memoir.
“I didn’t hear him say those things,” he said. “Now, did he say those things to other people later in the day? It’s certainly possible.”
“I have not heard anybody say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound like the Donald Trump I know,’” Bolton said, adding that the president’s disdain might have stemmed from his position on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“He was prone to say from time to time: ‘What did they get out of it? What was the worth of the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan?’” Bolton said. “That is a kind of insensitivity that Trump does have. There’s no doubt about it.”
Bolton also called on the four sources to identify themselves publicly, saying that he did so with his book.
