Cable news is a wild place, folks. People just getting up on the TV and admitting in front of god and their mothers and a television audience all sorts of insane personal details that are best left stuffed into the deep dark recesses of their souls. Like, the time Fox News host Pete Hegseth admitted he hadn’t washed his hands in a decade; or the time his fellow haircut Jesse Watters brought proof that his mom thinks his whole career stinks; or most recently, when mustachioed former U.N. Ambassador and National Security Advisor John Bolton got up and bravely bragged about how much he knew about successfully committing major international crimes?
As the January 6 Congressional Committee continues its inexorable-seeming dump of hard evidence linking former President Donald Trump to every facet of the failed insurrection in his waning days in office, Trump’s onetime top aide on all things NatSec decided to weigh in on whether or not his onetime boss was even capable of such a sweeping play for power, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump was little-c constitutionally incapable of executing a coup d’etat.
“That’s not the way Donald Trump does things,” Bolton insisted. “It’s rambling from one half, vast idea to another. One plan that falls through and another comes up. That’s what he was doing.”
There is a grain of recognizable truth to Bolton’s assessment. Trump hardly seems like the sort of methodical grand strategist who maps out an intricate series of domino-steps necessary to fall in successive order to retain political power. And yet, as we have seen time and again with each January 6 hearing, he was nevertheless at the center of a very real, very deliberate plot to essentially overthrow the normal operation of government and instal himself as an unelected head of state. Still, in Bolton’s extremely pedantic estimation, that’s not enough to be taxonomically categorized as an official coup.
“One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup,” Tapper noted in response to Bolton’s characterization of his former employer. To which Bolton just straight up blurted out: “I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coup d’etat, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work.”
At this time please feel free to place a vinyl LP on your nearest record player, and then stop it with an ear splitting scratch.
Look, is it a surprise that Bolton, a man who never met a war he didn’t like, was probably involved in illegally overthrowing a sovereign nation’s government? Of course not. He lives for this shit! But to just get up there on TV and brag about how good you are at it? C’mon man. Hello? The Hague? Can you send some guys over to the CNN studios real quick, we’ve got a real world class moron over here just begging to be put on trial.
There’s a reason Bolton thought he could get away with puffing out his chest over his coup bona fides, and that reason starts with “Jake” and ends with “Tapper.” Because while most people, upon hearing a major figure in the upper echelons of US foreign policy admit to literally overthrowing governments, would be like “bwa??” and then immediately disregard everything else they had planned to talk about in order to pursue this extremely significant revelation, Tapper just kind of ... lets it slide with a haughty “I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me.” Bolton’s gamble paid off, with Tapper not only declining to hold his feet to the fire, but essentially validating his entire assessment of Trump as being too inept to carry out the thing he very obviously carried out.
Bolton continued his media coup (ha ha ha) on Wednesday, doubling down on his comments in a separate interview with Newsmax. “There are a lot of snowflakes out there that don't understand what you need to do to protect the United States,” he insisted, which ... my man, if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
