Trump calls Bolton ‘one of the dumbest people in Washington’ after former aide decries talk of martial law

Donald Trump has reignited a longstanding feud with his former national security adviser, describing John Bolton as “one of the dumbest people in Washington” in a tweet after the president's ex-appointee lambasted him on television.

“What would Bolton, one of the dumbest people in Washington, know?” the president wrote in a tweet posted just after midnight on Sunday. “Wasn’t he the person who so stupidly said, on television, ‘Libyan solution’, when describing what the U.S. was going to do for North Korea?”

Mr Trump then added: “I’ve got plenty of other Bolton ‘stupid stories.’”

The president’s late-night tweets came after Mr Bolton appeared on CNN and decried comments made by Michael Flynn, another former national security adviser who Mr Trump pardoned after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his secret work for the Turkish government before joining the White House administration.

Flynn has suggested the president could enact martial law as part of a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the 2020 elections, saying in a recent appearance on Newsmax that Mr Trump “could take military capabilities, and he could place those in states and basically rerun an election in each of those states” if he wanted to.

In reality, the president does not appear to have any remaining options in his undemocratic attempts to overturn his electoral defeat to President-elect Joe Biden. The Electoral College has confirmed Mr Biden’s victory after he received more votes than any winning candidate in the nation’s history, and flipped a number of crucial battleground states to the Democratic Party.

Mr Trump’s lawsuits have largely been discredited and debunked by state and federal judges, and there does not appear to be enough support in Congress and the Senate to challenge the vote in any meaningful way. Still, the president has raised over $200 million since Election Day while vowing to hold onto power.

And he reportedly met with Flynn on Friday in the Oval Office, according to the New York Times, which said the two men discussed the possibility of enacting martial law.

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But the president was hitting out at the New York Times and his former adviser by Sunday, writing in another tweet: “Martial law = Fake News. Just more knowingly bad reporting!”

Mr Bolton described the comments as “appalling” in an interview with CNN on Saturday, adding: “There’s no other way to describe it. It’s unbelievable, almost certainly completely without precedent.”

“I don’t think he’s ever read the Constitution,” Mr Bolton said. “If he has, he clearly doesn’t understand it. And if he did understand it at one point, he’s forgotten it.”

The two have been at odds with each other ever since Mr Bolton left the administration in September 2019 and later wrote a book detailing his experiences in the White House. The president later filed a lawsuit against his former national security adviser demanding he stop publishing the book, which never happened.