Donald Trump got candid with Joe Rogan about his first term as president, and admitted that his biggest mistake was his choice of certain personnel.
“I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked,” the former president said.
“Neocons?” asked Rogan.
“Yeah, neocons. Or bad people. Or disloyal people.”
“Or people that gave you bad advice?”
“Yeah. You’ve been reading about them today. A guy like Kelly, who’s a bully, but a weak person… He’s bad. Bolton was an idiot, but he was great for me.”
Trump then recounts how billionaire hotel-and-casino owner Phil Ruffin warned him not to choose Bolton, but the choice had already been made.
“He was good in a certain way,” Trump continues, on the subject of Bolton.
“He’s a nutjob. Every time I had to deal with a country, they saw this whackjob standing behind me, they said, ‘Oh man, Trump’s gonna go to war with us. He was with Bush when they stupidly went into the Middle East.’
John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, was quoted in an Atlantic hitpiece this week as claiming that Trump repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler during his time in office.
The claim was seized upon by Trump’s opponents as evidence that he is a dictator-in-the-making. John Bolton—Trump’s other target in his discussion with Rogan—described Trump as “too stupid to be fascist,” in response to the Atlantic story, and Vice President Kamala Harris held an impromptu press conference at which she condemned Trump for his supposed admiration of the Nazi leader.
Trump himself condemned the story as a desperate tactic, and called Harris the real “threat to democracy.” In a statement on his social-media platform Truth Social, he said, “Comrade Kamala Harris sees that she is losing, and losing badly, especially after stealing the Race from Crooked Joe Biden, so now she is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind. She is a Threat to Democracy, and not fit to be President of the United States — And her Polling so indicates!”
At time of writing, Joe Rogan’s podcast with Donald Trump, which was released on Friday, has 25 million views on YouTube alone.