Former national security adviser John Bolton failed to get that President Trump was joking when he said that he should be able to serve more than two terms, another former adviser says.
In an excerpt from his controversial forthcoming book, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton claimed that in a 2018 encounter with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said, “people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for [Trump],” in response to Xi saying that “he wanted to work with Trump for six more years.”
Yet, Casey Mulligan, who served as the chief economist of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers during the same time period that Bolton was head of the National Security Council, said that Bolton’s characterization is not accurate.
“Trump jokingly said, ‘My opponents say I have found a way to change the Constitution and serve more than two terms,'” said Mulligan. Although Mulligan was not present during Trump’s meeting with President Xi in 2018, Mulligan said Trump’s comment during that encounter was part of a well-known riff or joke that Trump had told many times and that Bolton would have been aware of.
Bolton misconstrued Trump’s words to suggest Trump himself wanted to serve more than two terms when the “people” that Bolton refers to were instead Trump’s political enemies, Mulligan said. Furthermore, Bolton did not give appropriate context to Trump’s two-term comment in his book excerpt, said Mulligan.
“Bolton should have said this was a joke. Trump said this riff frequently, and Bolton should have given that full context,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Bolton claims in the excerpt that Trump’s conversation with President Xi reflected the president’s attitude of conflating “his own political interests and U.S. national interests.”
Mulligan said that Bolton’s recount of this incident and many others in his book are “taken out of context, or he can’t think straight.”
“I was brought up on the English language, I don’t know what language he was raised on,” said Mulligan.
Mulligan will soon be publishing his own Trump tell-all book called You’re Hired!: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President, which Mulligan said is an even-keeled description of his time in the White House, from July 2018 to June 2019.
Like Bolton, Mulligan said he is critical of Trump in some parts of his book, but those instances are well documented with evidence and context he claims, unlike Bolton’s fault-finding.
