Second Trump term would suffer from poor 'quality of people': ex-National Security Adviser

Former President Donald Trump will not be able to surround himself with qualified people to advise him if he is elected to another term, warned former National Security Adviser John Bolton in a radio interview reported on by Newsweek.

Bolton, who clashed with Trump while in the White House, has become a sharp critic of his former boss since leaving, calling him unfit for office and particularly focusing on the criminal case involving the keeping of classified defense information at Mar-a-Lago.

"I do not think that he would ask me to [work in his Cabinet], and my answer would be no. I don't think [Trump's] fit to be president, and I think one of his problems in a second term if he were to win is that many other people, like myself, would not want to serve in his administration," Bolton said on Tuesday in conversation with Ecuadorian radio host Guillermo Hidalgo. "The quality of people would unfortunately not be what a president needs for senior advisers."

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Bolton added that he considers it inevitable that Trump and Biden are heading for a rematch this year.

This comes amid reporting on how strategists supporting Trump have laid out plans to flood the civil service with party loyalists to run even routine functions of the government according to Trump's whims.

Trump has so far won the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, with only former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, also an alum of the Trump administration, remaining as a major candidate challenging him for the GOP nomination.