John Bolton Issues Dire Warning About Trump’s Grasp of Reality

Former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton was thoroughly unimpressed with Donald Trump’s last-minute presser at Mar-a-Lago, criticizing him as a man so dishonest that he can no longer perceive the difference between the truth and his lies.

Responding to a clip from Trump’s Thursday speech in which the former president claimed he had been “protective” of Hillary Clinton during his administration (despite telling crowds at the time that she should “be in jail” and be “locked up”), Bolton told CNN that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”

“It’s not that he lies a lot because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference,” Bolton continued. “So he makes up what he wants to say at any given time. If it happens to comport with what everybody else sees—well, that’s fine. And if it doesn’t comport with anybody else, he doesn’t really care and he’s had decades of getting away with it.

“So in his mind, the truth is whatever he wants it to be. And that’s what you heard today,” Bolton added.

Trump’s list of lies on Thursday was almost the length of his speech. Among them included claims that his January 6 crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (it wasn’t even close). He insisted that Democrats want to gut Social Security (they don’t, but Republicans are trying to). And he swore that no one died on January 6 (four of his own supporters died from the events, including Ashli Babbitt, whom Trump and his allies attempted to morph into a MAGA martyr).

He also, strangely, drew out an entirely fabricated tall tale about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Vice President Kamala Harris’s old boyfriend, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Hours after the press conference, it became clear that the actual passengers who shared the 2018 helicopter ride with Trump were former California Governor Jerry Brown and current California Governor Gavin Newsom, both of whom called bullshit on the story.