Former US national security advisor John Bolton and the President Donald J. Trump share traits neither probably knew they had.  The latter, for one, is far more war mongering than he let on to American voters, evidenced by his recently failed, disastrous foray into attacking Iran.  Bolton, on the other hand, has been a consistent war addict, the neocon’s preferred position in projecting US power through what the British used to call might.  Earlier in June, Trump had the fantastic gall to say this about the man who had a brief stint as his own moustachioed national security advisor from 2018 to 2019: “I never thought [Bolton] was a smart person, that he was a radical right in terms of war, not in terms of other things.  He was.  He wanted to go to war with anybody that opened their mouth, anybody that talked, and I used him for a purpose, you know.”  Yet another one of the president’s mirror portraits.

Trump went on to note Bolton’s involvement with the administration of President George W. Bush where “he created a lot of problems, but he always wanted to kill people in war, and that was okay for me, as long as I didn’t listen to him, which I never did.”  Listening to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu must have been quite something else.

That other commonly shared trait between the two is a rather sketchy approach to handling classified documents.  In October 2025, a grand jury indicted Bolton for the discovery of private journal entries, private notes and assortment of classified material from his time as national security advisor.  Many of the “diary” entries about his daily activities contained, among other things, military plans for adversarial foreign governments, covert US activities in various theatres, and intelligence on adversarial heads of state. This might have stayed buried but for the hacking activities of, as the Department of Justice put it, “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran”.  (The hack of Bolton’s personal email account was reported after he left office in September 2019 with one glaring omission: he did not tell the FBI or anyone else in government that the account contained national defence information.)  How fitting in its symmetry that both Bolton and Trump have........

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