‘Disgruntled boring fool’: Trump lashes out at former aide John Bolton over details in tell-all book

White House has made efforts to obstruct book’s publication, citing supposed threat to national security

As unflattering excerpts from former national security adviser John Bolton’s book start to emerge, Donald Trump has vented his fury at the author, calling him a “dope” whom he was happy to fire and dismissing the book as “fake”.

Citing a pre-publication review in The New York Times, Mr Trump tweeted that Mr Bolton was an an worthy adviser whose behaviour towards him had changed radically after being fired.

“Wacko John Bolton’s “exceedingly tedious”(New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!” he said.

Mr Bolton is far from the first former adviser whom Mr Trump has torn into after they dared to speak out against him, post-departure.

When former defence secretary and general James Mattis told the Atlantic earlier this year that Mr Trump was a threat to the US constitution, the president called him “the world’s most overrated general” and said he had “the honour of firing him”.

And when former chief of staff John Kelly, another general, criticised several of the president’s foreign policy moves and called his efforts to extract favours from Ukraine “illegal”, Mr Trump turned similarly bitter.

“Being Chief of Staff just wasn’t for him, he tweeted. “He came in with a bang, went out with a whimper, but like so many X’s, he misses the action & just can’t keep his mouth shut, which he actually has a military and legal obligation to do.”

The Times’s Jennifer Szalai does indeed use the words “exceedingly tedious” in her review of the book, The Room Where it Happened, and the full sentence that surrounds Mr Trump’s quote is in fact more disparaging still. “It toggles between two discordant registers,” she writes: “exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.”

Describing Mr Bolton as “an unlikely hybrid of Ned Flanders and Yosemite Sam”, Ms Szalai faults him for his prose, his reasoning, and for leaving potentially incendiary anecdotes “to swim in a stew of superfluous detail”.

She also points out that his pessimistic explanation for not testifying in Mr Trump’s impeachment trial makes little sense, calling his logic “a self-righteous and self-serving sort of fatalism”.

Nonetheless, the already-published excerpts from the book have lit up the news cycle, particularly a story in which Mr Trump asked Chinese premier Xi Jinping to assist him in his re-election by buying as many American crops as he can. “I would print Trump’s exact words,” writes Bolton, “but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.”