A former adviser to Donald Trump thinks he’s getting played by Vladimir Putin in the flailing efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Former national security adviser John Bolton told The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump, 79, isn’t exactly playing a “complex game of three-dimensional chess” in the Russia-Ukraine war, contrary to what many of his supporters believe—in fact, it may be the American president who’s getting manipulated.
“He’s barely doing this one move at a time,” Bolton, 77, said of Trump’s peacemaking bid. “I think what you’re seeing is that Putin, going back to the first term, used his KGB training to figure out how to manipulate Trump. Other foreign leaders have figured it out too.”
“And I don’t mean anything nefarious about KGB training,” he went on. “I mean, it boils down to assessing your target’s vulnerabilities and then exploiting them. And I think that’s what Putin has done with great success with Trump.”
Trump, who promised to end the war on his first day back in power, has repeatedly been humiliated by his Russian counterpart, with whom he has developed a love-hate relationship.
A series of peace talks last week yet again failed to yield any significant movement, forcing Trump to admit, “I don’t know what the Kremlin is doing” after his advisers had a “reasonably good meeting” with Putin that lasted nearly five hours.
U.S. officials didn’t seem to get much luck with the Ukrainians, either. In an X post about his call with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that followed three days of talks between Ukrainian and American negotiators, Zelensky said there was “still work to be done” to ensure Russia’s commitment to ending the war.
Last month, Zelensky was forced to express gratitude for U.S. support after Trump went on a Truth Social rampage bashing Ukraine as ungrateful: “It is important that there is dialogue with the American representatives, and there are signals President Trump’s team is hearing us,” he said on X.
Bolton said, however, that Zelensky’s efforts to appease Trump after their disastrous Oval Office shouting match in February don’t appear to be moving the needle.
“Zelensky’s worked hard to establish a personal relationship after the February debacle in the Oval Office. I give him a lot of credit for effort, but it doesn’t take,” he said. “And I think that’s one reason now, in the past few days, Trump has been tilting back toward Putin. I mean, let’s see where he is after Christmas. It could be the other direction again.”
Bolton is all too familiar with Trump’s thinking, having served as the president’s national security adviser during his first term before becoming an enemy over disagreements in policy.
“I think Trump in the first term came to understand that when people said, ‘Mr. President, have you thought about this factor, that factor, the other factor? Mr. President, have you considered alternatives A, B, C? Have you done the cost-benefit analysis?’ That he thought that myself, others were trying to prevent him from making the decision he wanted,” he recalled.
Bolton said Trump often chose to make decisions “via neuron flash, which is his typical style.”
“He thinks relations between states are a function of the relations between their leaders. So, for example, if he has good relations with Vladimir Putin, he thinks U.S.-Russian state-to-state relations are good,” he said. “And how you do a deal is you size up the person on the other side of the table and you just leave facts and details and stuff like that to your subordinates, you and the other big guy just get together and make the decision.”
“Maybe that’s how it works in New York real estate, I wouldn’t know. It’s not how it works internationally. And his unwillingness to consider the consequences of his actions leads him to do things that suddenly get very hard to unravel.”
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
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