Former national security adviser John Bolton said it’s a typical occurrence for President Trump to promote content, including racist or offensive language, without realizing the full context.
Bolton addressed his former boss’s retweet of a controversial video on Sunday that showed a man driving a golf cart with Trump 2020 signs and shouting, “White power!” at anti-Trump protesters in Florida.
“Thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!” the president wrote in a tweet he later deleted.
“He doesn’t pay attention to a lot of things. It’s entirely possible that he tweeted this video because he saw the [campaign] sign,” Bolton said on CNN’s State of the Union, adding, “That’s all he needed to see. Not paying attention, not considering all of the implications of information he gets, is typical of Trump.”
Trump’s retweet was met with concern by lawmakers across the aisle. Bolton added it’s possible Trump retweeted the video knowing the content to inflame racial tensions, in addition to the possibility that Trump didn’t know what was in the video at all.
“So it may be that you can draw a conclusion that he heard it, and it was racist, and he tweeted it to promote the message,” he said. “It’s a legitimate conclusion to draw. It’s also entirely legitimate to say he just had no idea what else was in the video other than the Trump sign.”
Bolton and Trump’s relationship soured this month after Bolton began promoting his new book, which depicts a chaotic and corrupt White House under Trump.
