John Bolton, the former national security advisor to Donald Trump, said that former president Donald Trump’s action is “old and tired” and said that the Republican party is now set to move on to a new and exciting race.
John Bolton is the new ex-White House Official who criticized Donald Trump after the worst performance of the Republicans in the midterm elections held on 8 November 2022. It depicted that it added to a losing streak that persuaded him he was hurting rather than helping the party out of problems.
Bolton said, “There are a lot of reasons to be against Trump being the nominee, but the one I’m hearing now as I call around the country, talking to my supporters and others about what happened on 8 November, is the number of people who have just switched Trump off in their brain.” He further said,” Even if they loved his style, loved his approach, loved his policies, loved everything about him, they don’t want to lose. The fear is, given the results on 8 November, that if he got the nomination, not only would he lose the general election, but he would take an awful lot of Republican candidates down with him.”
Bolton is currently 74 years old and has served as US ambassador to the UN under President George W Bush from 2005 to 2006 and played a crucial role in the advocacy of the Iraq war. He became Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 but was soon fired from the post the next year; then he wrote a ferocious memoir that declared that the president is unfit and inept for the office.
Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, and attorney general William Barr pointed out that the Republicans couldn’t secure a place in 2018, 2020, and again in 2022. It gained fewer seats than was expected in the House. Paul Ryan, the new Republican speaker of the House, blamed the Trump factor saying, “I think it’s palpable right now. We get past Trump; we start winning elections. We stick with Trump, we keep losing elections.”
Donald Trump declared his third consecutive presidential run last week for the White House, and he still holds significant support in the Republican House. His power and influence were proof in the Republican primary elections, where many of his anointed nominees were persuaded over establishment figures such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
Bolton said, “There’s no doubt Trump’s endorsement in the primary can be very valuable to a candidate in the Republican party. But relying on that endorsement or trumpeting yourself as the Trump-endorsed candidate is poisonous in the general election. So if you actually want to win elections, Trump is not the answer.
“William F Buckley [the conservative author] once had a rule that in Republican primaries he supported the most conservative candidate capable of winning the general election and, under that theory, Trump loses.”
Bolton said he had organized his own polling that depicts Trump’s base within the party has been gradually decreasing but continuously for two years.
He said: “One question we asked was: do you want Trump or do you want a fresh face? I think in our last poll, over 50% said they wanted a fresh face. That’s only going to continue. I personally don’t think Biden is going to end up running on the Democratic side, and that’ll have an impact as well.”
Pence, Pompeo, and Christie are the possible competitors to Trump for the presidential election of 2024, but now his strongest competitor is Florida governor Ron DeSantis who delivered a “red wave” to Florida when he was re-elected as a governor. Besides, Ron is a former navy lawyer who also worked at the base in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq.
Ron’s foreign policies will likely meet with Bolton and other policy hawks. Ron also criticized Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. He expressed his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and took a hard step on China, Cuba, and Venezuela. He reminded his followers that he had promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in America.
Ron DeSantis said he had a victorious run as a governor of Florida. He said that he won the primary election with a good number of votes. Many people had taken him as the next-generation candidate, and that was Trump’s biggest issue; his actions are old and tired now.
The next election can reveal and aggravate a foreign policy divide in the Republican Party between an obtrusive wing, epitomized by Bolton, Liz Cheney, and “America First” isolationism embedded by Trump and Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, who has demanded a halt to funding Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Bolton, who is also the founder of the Foundation for American Security and Freedom, commented, “Within the party as a whole, support for the Ukrainian government and people are overwhelming. I do plan to spend some time in the next two years working against what I would call the virus of isolationism within the Republican party to make sure it does not become a serious force.”
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