Former National Security Advisor John Bolton is hopeful Republicans can recover from the damage he believes President Donald Trump’s presidency has done to the party.
MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked Bolton on Monday how Republicans can “make things right” after enabling Trump and his actions.
“There has to be a serious conversation in the Republican Party about how to remove the taint of what Trump has done, how to repair the damage,” Bolton said.
He added, “While I think the damage is considerable, I think it can be repaired, and it should be repaired. And it should be, from the purely limited perspective of the party, it should be the highest priority going forward.”
Watch his comments below:
Bolton indicated Trump’s influence “will decline significantly,” especially after his efforts to object to the Electoral College results.
He rejected the idea of blaming every Republican for Trump’s actions.
“I don’t think you can attribute Trump to everybody else. I think this is something that’s an aberration in American politics. It’s resulted in a tragedy as we saw on Wednesday,” Bolton said.
He continued, “To try and blame everybody else, I think, is simply more Washington politics. The focus here should be on the real problem, the center of the problem, and that’s Donald Trump.”
Bolton noted there were some Republicans who backed the president’s effort to overturn the election and he does not “see any reason why they shouldn’t be held accountable.”
He argued, “It just is unrealistic and unfair to hold everybody else responsible for what one person has done and I think that that is, that is a political tactic that we can see. It’s one of the reasons why it’s important to purge the taint of Trumpism.”
Tur asked if Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) should be punished for supporting Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
“I think individual Republicans are going to have to make decisions whether they support individuals who have participated in this effort to stop the election from being certified. And I think there’s a lot that remains to be seen from their behavior,” Bolton said.
