Former US president and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has told podcaster Joe Rogan that his “biggest mistake” was making a number of wrong personnel decisions during his time in the White House between 2017 and 2021.
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.”
Speaking about claims by former chief of staff Kelly with CNN earlier this week, Bolton warned that a Trump victory in next month’s election would be “dangerous” for America.
However, he rejected accusations of the former president being a “fascist.” According to the hawk, in order to be one “you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that.”