Trump handler Vladimir Putin was “automatically in better shape” than Donald Trump to negotiate over the war in Ukraine last Friday, the president’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, said Monday.
Bolton also told The Daily Beast Podcast about his experience briefing the president on another consequential summit with Putin back in 2018—and what challenges that entailed.
“Typically, he has not read the briefing materials that are prepared, really, by the National Security Council staff with inputs from all of the affected departments and agencies,” Bolton, who served under Trump in the middle of his first term, told host Joanna Coles.
“It’s pretty standard practice across almost all presidencies in the modern time, and they were laboriously put together, and I’m quite confident he read little or none of them in most cases.
“We tried to arrange briefings with greater or lesser success before we departed from Washington, but sometimes that was quite difficult,” Bolton went on, citing preparations aboard Air Force One while flying from Scotland to Finland in July 2018.
“I briefed him on strategic arms issues and negotiations with Russia while we were flying on Air Force One. He was in his cabin watching a FIFA soccer match, so I had to compete for attention with that,” Bolton recalled.
The match that caught Trump’s eye that afternoon was the men’s World Cup final in Moscow between France and Croatia.
