President Trump called John Bolton a “jerk” Monday, saying the former White House national security adviser made the mistake of taking literally his description of exchanging “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
“Just heard that Wacko John Bolton was talking of the fact that I discussed ‘love letters from Kim Jong Un’ as though I viewed them as just that. Obviously, was just being sarcastic,” Trump said on Twitter. “Bolton was such a jerk!”
Bolton wrote a scathing memoir — “The Room Where It Happened” — about his time in the White House that accused Trump of cozying up to dictators and described the president as being out of his league when dealing with foreign leaders.
Bolton, who served as the national security adviser for 17 months before Trump fired him in September 2019, said the North Korean strongman got a laugh out of Trump characterizing correspondence between the two as “love letters.”
“I don’t know any other explanation. I think Kim Jong Un gets a huge laugh out of this,” Bolton said in an interview in June with ABC News.
“I mean, these letters that the president has shown to the press — off the record and whatnot, but I’ve been in the room when he’s done it — are written by some functionary in the North Korean Workers Party Agitprop Office,” he said.
“And yet, the president has looked at them as evidence of this deep friendship. Even if it were a deep personal relationship, it doesn’t change the fact Kim Jong Un is never gonna give up his nuclear weapons program. And from the US national security point of view, that is the only thing that matters.,” Bolton continued.
Trump and Kim have met for three summits to discuss denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.
Still, the two exchanged correspondence over Kim’s nuclear ambitions.
Trump described his written communications with Kim as “beautiful letters” and said the two “fell in love” over them.
“I was really tough and so was he, and we went back and forth,” Trump told a crowd in Wheeling, W.Va., in September 2018 after meeting with Kim during a June summit in Singapore. “And then we fell in love, OK? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
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