Trump 'hasn't got the brains' to be a dictator, his ex-national security advisor says

• John Bolton disparaged the former president's intellectual capacity in a Le Figaro interview.
• Trump's ex-national security advisor has become a vocal critic of his former boss.

Donald Trump's ex-national security advisor, John Bolton, said the former president "doesn't have the brains" to be a dictator in a recent interview with French daily Le Figaro.

As questions arise about what a second Trump term would look like, Bolton, 75, not only disparaged Trump's intellectual capacity, he also mocked the former president's professional background, saying: "He's a property developer, for God's sake!"

He added: "Regarding the possibility of overthrowing the Republic, let's be clear: Donald Trump is not Julius Caesar!" Bolton said.

Bolton is a veteran figure of the Republican right turned vociferous critic of his former boss.

The hawkish foreign-policy advisor, who has served four Republican presidencies, used to be a mainstay on Fox News. But after revelations from his memoir undercut a key part of President Donald Trump's impeachment defense, allies of Trump denounced Bolton.

Bolton cautioned that President Joe Biden was "making a mistake by threatening the country with an apocalypse if Trump comes back."

Biden, along with his political allies, has consistently warned that "Trump's assault on democracy isn't just part of his past. It's what he's promising for the future."

Bolton said the American Constitution and its institutions were strong.

"If he wasn't able to steal the election when he was in the Oval Office, it's not going to happen in November from Mar-a-Lago. The Constitution is very clear. There will be no third term," he said per Le Figaro.

Two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential elections, Donald Trump was accused of threatening US democratic norms when a group of people supporting the then-US president stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

For Trump, Bolton said: "Everything is episodic, anecdotal, transactional. And everything is contingent on the question of how this will benefit Donald Trump."

In a new foreword to his book on life inside the Trump presidency, "The Room Where It Happened," Bolton wrote, "Trump is unfit to be president."

And though he may not believe Trump can run a dictatorship — the former president has previously stated that he plans to be a dictator, if only for the first day of his presidency, if he were re-elected — Bolton warns in his book that: "If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse."

Leaving NATO

In his interview with the French daily, Bolton reiterated his previous assertions that Trump would "very likely" seek to leave NATO if reelected.

The Republican Party's presumptive nominee caused outrage last month when he said he would encourage Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to "delinquent" members of NATO who failed to make defense payments of two percent of their gross domestic product to the alliance.

Bolton added that in Trump's view, America's allies "have deceived us and forced us to sign unsavoury trade treaties."

"The truth is that, for him, the Europeans are not really our friends."