Trump ends Secret Service detail for former ally—in another petty move
Donald Trump has terminated the Secret Service detail assigned to his former national security adviser John Bolton. The move comes at the same time that Trump revoked Bolton and other former national security officials’ security clearances.
“I am disappointed but not surprised that President Trump has made this decision,” Bolton confirmed to CNN. “Notwithstanding my criticisms of President [Joe] Biden’s national-security policies, he nonetheless made the decision to once again extend Secret Service protection to me in 2021.”
In 2022, the Justice Department revealed that Bolton was allegedly the subject of an assassination plot by a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “The Justice Department has the solemn duty to defend our citizens from hostile governments who seek to hurt or kill them,” the DOJ explained in a statement at the time.
At the time, the DOJ said that Bolton and other Trump-era officials became a focus of the IRGC after Trump ordered an airstrike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. The Biden administration levied sanctions on Iran over the alleged plots to kill Bolton and others in 2023.
Not surprisingly, Bolton was a part of the “enemies list” Trump posted on social media last week. Bolton has publicly criticized Trump, saying his former boss was bewilderingly ignorant about foreign policy, and calling him “unfit to be president” in the runup to the 2024 election.
Bolton is a crummy person who ran into a more powerful crummy person. The concoction that creates a fascist is power, vindictiveness, and pettiness—and it doesn’t hurt to be a little stupid in order to delude yourself. Trump’s got it all.