On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered a series of confusing comments about that morning’s FBI raid on the home of his onetime national security adviser John Bolton.
The president told reporters that he was not yet briefed on the raid on the Maryland residence of Bolton, who is a vocal critic of the president’s decision-making, character, and mental acuity.
“I saw it on television this morning,” Trump said, quickly adding: “I’m not a fan of John Bolton. He’s a real, sort of a low life.… He’s not a smart guy. He could be a very unpatriotic guy.”
Since his contentious 17-month stint in Trump’s first administration, Bolton has repeatedly drawn his former boss’s ire—including for publishing a 2020 tell-all, In the Room Where It Happened, which described Trump as incompetent and unfit for office. Trump’s first-term Justice Department investigated Bolton over the book, claiming it contained classified information. Similarly, Friday’s raid, per NBC, was part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.”
During his remarks about Bolton, Trump also made a point to assert that he “could” have hypothetically been the one who ordered the search but insisted this was done by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department.
In doing so, the president sounded not unlike a Mafia boss describing how he insulates himself from misdeeds.
“I tell Pam [Bondi], and I tell the group, ‘I don’t want to know, but just—you have to do what you have to do.’ I don’t want to know about it. It’s not necessary,” Trump said, adding, “I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer, but I feel that it’s better this way.”
Here, Trump all but admitted to borrowing a page from England’s King Henry II, who is said to have uttered, regarding the archbishop of Canterbury, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”—and thereby enjoyed plausible deniability when his underlings killed the man vexing him.
It’s not the first time Trump has sounded like a mob boss or a monarch. And it surely won’t be the last time the administration seemingly wields the government against those deemed guilty of lèse-majesté against him.
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