“Real Time” host Bill Maher on Friday pressed former national security adviser John Bolton on why he’s not throwing his support behind former Vice President Joe Biden come November after the longtime foreign policy hawk criticized President Trump as damaging to the country.
Bolton this week released his new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” despite the Trump administration’s efforts to block it. The book paints a chaotic and divisive scene at senior levels of the White House and includes a number of allegations about the president himself.
“You say coddling of [North Korean leader] Kim [Jong Un] made you ill. … Siding with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin at Helsinki. Abandoning the Kurds. You called the Ukrainian thing that got him impeached a ‘drug deal.’ You didn’t want any part of that,” Maher said to Bolton on Friday, referencing some of topics that Bolton discusses in his book.
“You were there when he said to [President] Xi [Jinping] of China, people are talking about maybe repealing that law that says I can’t only have two terms. And yet you won’t vote for Biden. … How could Biden be worse? What could the Democrat be that you think this list could be surpassed by?” Maher asked.
Bolton responded that his “opposition” to Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is “philosophical.”
“I wish there were a conservative Republican I could vote for who had a chance of winning, but there’s not,” he added on the show.
Maher retorted that voters “only get two choices” in November’s general election.
Bolton has been fiercely critical of Trump while promoting his new book, saying this week he hopes Trump will be remembered as a one-term president and saying he poses a “danger for the republic.”
Trump, who has sought to delegitimize Bolton, has also repeatedly lashed out at him, calling him a “wacko” and “incompetent.”
The president has claimed that much of Bolton’s book is false, while the Justice Department has simultaneously alleged that it contains classified information, claims Bolton’s lawyer has rejected.