In a new interview with Business Insider to promote his best-selling Donald Trump tell-all, “The Room Where It Happened,” John Bolton says he doesn’t plan to vote for Donald Trump. But to any Democrats who think (or worry) Bolton might cross the aisle, relax: He says doesn’t plan to vote for Joe Biden either.
“I’m not going to vote for Biden for philosophical reasons, and I’m not going to vote for Trump for philosophical reasons and because he’s not competent,” the former national security advisor told Business Insider.
Bolton didn’t elaborate on what those “philosophical” differences are, though he did say that he doesn’t actually plan to cast his vote for a viable candidate in any sense. Instead, he told BI he’s “thinking of names” to write in, though he declined to share them out of fear doing so would cause “a two-minute Twitter rant by the president, and they don’t need that.”
Bolton drew distinctions between himself and Trump. For instance, he said he opposes any delay of the 2020 election, something Trump has hinted he might do despite having absolutely no legal authority to do so. “It’s completely beyond any reasonable consideration to delay the election. It’s set by statute and the idea of changing it at the last minute, I just think no one in the Republican Party was prepared to accept outside of the White House staff, perhaps. And I found it very troubling that the president would even talk about it,” he said.
But Bolton also seemed to agrees with Trump, saying he is largely against mail-in voting and early voting, measures that expand voter access to people who don’t have the luxury of taking off work to vote on a Tuesday and can also keep people safe amid the coronavirus pandemic. “I think there’s a central element of democratic theory that we have the opportunity as a nation to do one thing all together on one day,” he said, “that we all show up at the polling place and vote.”
That said, Bolton does say Trump’s response to the pandemic has been “a failure,” and said overall Trump “ranks at the bottom” among U.S. presidents, and that he thought about resigning more than once during his final months as national security advisor. So why didn’t he? “If you thought about resigning each and every time something objectionable happened, you’d last about three or four hours in the job,” he told Business Insider.