Former US president Donald Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan that his “biggest mistake” was his choice of certain personnel during his time in the White House.
“I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked,” Trump admitted.
“Neocons?” asked Rogan.
“Yeah, neocons. Or bad people. Or disloyal people.”
RT reports: Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Saturday, Trump insisted that his was a “great presidency” but pointed out that it could have been even better if he had surrounded himself with different people.
“The biggest mistake I made, was I picked… a few people that I should not have picked,” he said.
When asked by Rogan if he was talking about the neocons (neoconservatives), the former president said: “Yes, neocons, or bad people, or disloyal people.”
“You are reading about them a little bit today. A guy like Kelly, who is a bully, but a weak person,” he said.
Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly recently gave several interviews in which he claimed that, during his time in office, his 78-year-old commander-in-chief had praised Hitler in private and said “more than once” that the infamous leader of Nazi Germany “did some good things.”
While the Trump team has denied the claims outright, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris took the opportunity to brand her Republican rival a “fascist” and a would-be dictator.
His other questionable choice, Trump recalled on the podcast, was appointing arch-hawk John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, Trump acknowledged. “Bolton was an idiot, but he was great for me,” he said.
“He is a nutjob, and every time I had to deal with a country – when they saw this whack job standing behind me – they said: ‘Oh man, Trump is going to go to war with him,” the former president said.
Bolton “was with [US president George HW] Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East [in 1990]. They should have never done it. I used to say it as a civilian,” he added.
Trump fired Bolton in September 2019 after 18 months in the job, saying that he “disagreed strongly with many of [the adviser’s] suggestions.”
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