Speaker 1: Want to start today with super interesting video from the former national
security adviser, John Bolton, who went on CNN and casually admitted to planning coups
in the past.
Now, this is fascinating, not in that it's a huge shock to any followers of American
foreign policy over the years that the United States has been involved in organizing and
planning coups.
The interesting part is this this sort of casual and very nonchalant nature with which
John Bolton says to Jake TAPPER, listen, I've helped plan coups and what Donald Trump did
was not plan a coup.
And the point that Bolton was trying to make was that Trump may have had delusions about
staying in power even though he didn't win.
And he may have sort of casually said to Georgia officials or whoever, find me votes, find
me votes and fake slate of electors or whatever.
But that Trump was not organized enough.
Trump was not smart enough.
Trump was not scheming enough to really attempt a coup in any formal sense.
And it's sort of a weird defense of Trump.
And in so doing, he casually says, I've helped plan coups.
There's when you plan a coup, it's much tougher than what Donald Trump was was doing.
So let's take a look at the first part of the conversation.
Speaker 2: A lifetime occurrence.
I don't know that I agree with you to be to be fair, with all due respect, one doesn't
have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.
I disagree with that.
Is somebody who has helped plan coup d'etat, not here, but, you know, other places.
Of course, it takes a lot of work and that's not what he did.
Speaker 1: It coups are really tough work, guys.
Speaker 2: Just stumbling around from one idea to another.
Ultimately, he did unleash the rioters at the Capitol.
As to that, there's no doubt, but not overthrow the Constitution to buy more time, to throw
the matter back to the states, to try and redo the issue.
And if you don't believe that, you're going to overreact.
And I think that's a real risk for the committee, which has done a lot of good work, mostly
when the witnesses testify, not when the members are opining.
It is invariably the case that when you go too far trying to prove your case, you undermine
it.
And I think you got to give credit to the intelligence, to the American people to listen
to the witnesses.
Speaker 1: Okay.
So the point that Bolton is making is what Trump did was so unorganized that it's really
hard to call it a coup attempt.
And Bolton, of course, is comparing what Trump did to the coup attempts he's been involved
in, and they're much more meticulously planned, I guess Bolton is saying Bolton is saying
when I know how to plan coups and it's way more organized.
And of course, that may be, but that doesn't change the intention of what Donald Trump
was trying to do.
Now later in the interview, good for Jake TAPPER.
I guess he goes back to this issue.
But I do want to mention one thing, which is that Bolton, while he's saying the quiet
parts out loud, obviously TAPPER was talking about attempting a coup.
Said you don't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.
And Bolton saying to successfully execute the coup, you actually do need to be more
brilliant, more organized, whatever.
And it would have been important, I think, for Jake TAPPER to say, well, hold on a second.
Maybe you're right that for the coup to succeed, you need to be more intelligent or organized
or whatever.
But I'm talking about the attempt.
Then Trump attempted and failed, maybe due to incompetence, sort of talking past each
other in that sense.
And.
TAPPER Kind of let him get away with it.
It a little bit reminds me of this infinite monkey theorem.
I don't know.
This is just a silly thing.
Maybe it's not silly, but it's the idea that if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room with
a bunch of typewriters or maybe word processors or maybe personal computers or iPads or whatever
with word processing software, if you put them in there long enough and let them tap
away, eventually one of them will stumble across, you know, a Shakespearean play or
something, and they will write it.
And the idea of being okay, as incompetent as Donald Trump might've have been, if you
continue allowing incompetent people to feel around in the dark for ways to stay in power,
eventually they might successfully do it.
You might get, you know, a thousand failed coup attempts and then eventually you get
a successful one.
Doesn't really make it any less dangerous if those are the intentions of someone in
such a position of power.
Jake TAPPER goes back to it.
And so let's look at that now.
And John Bolton doesn't want to get into the specifics of the coups that he has planned.
Speaker 2: To anathema to the rest of the Republican Party.
And that's unacceptable.
I do want to ask a follow up.
When we were talking about what is capable or what you need to do to be able to plan
a coup and use you stated your expertize having planned coups.
I'm not going to get into the specifics, but it's so successful coups.
Well, I wrote about Venezuela in in the book and it turned out not to be successful, not
that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try
and overturn an illegally elected president.
And they failed the notion.
Donald Trump was half as confident as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.
Speaker 1: Again, this is sort of I mean, what's what he's saying is crazy.
Obviously, the fact that he's been planning coups is really hard work, Jake.
Trust me.
Take it from me again.
If you try to bribe someone and the target rejects the bribe, you've still committed
a crime.
Assuming it can be proven.
Of course, just because you were incompetent at doing it, you might plan a murder and do
it so incompetently that it doesn't succeed.
It doesn't mean it isn't attempted murder.
And this this insistence on Trump's just not nearly as competent as I was and even we weren't
able to successfully do.
The coup is a crazy defense.
Speaker 2: But I think there's a feel like you're this other stuff you're not telling
me, though.
I think I'm sure there is.
I think there's another point here that came out in the testimony that's not been stressed
enough testimony.
Speaker 1: All right.
Okay.
So there it is.
Now he's going on to other things.
So stunning, stunning stuff.
Casually admitting and saying, I'm not going to tell you about all the coups I've planned,
but I'm much smarter than Trump and even I didn't succeed in many of them.
Incredible stuff.
And just the reality of American foreign policy.
It's no surprise that it is.
The real shocker is it is this casual for the neo cons like Bolton that the US plans
and attempt and often fails at executing coups.
It's just part of what they do and it's like, Oh, we were we're better at Trump than Trump
at it.
And so Trump Trump's attempt is really no big deal.
Incredible stuff