As the secretary of state search expanded over the weekend inside the Trump transition team, the name of bespectacled conservative commentator John Bolton remained in the drawing hat for whomever might replace outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry.
Bolton, who served as an international diplomat for both President Bush’s and as a lawyer for President Ronald Reagan, is reportedly more likely to become the no. 2 leader in the State Department. However, that news hasn’t kept his name from surfacing in the carousel of Trump’s latest reality spectacle.
With the likelihood of him being named to a top administrative post imminent, here are five things to know about former U.N. ambassador John Bolton:
He graduated Yale Law alongside Justice Thomas and the Clintons
Wikimedia Commons
By 1964, Bolton’s conservatism became apparent as he held court in Yale Law School managing the school’s “Students For Goldwater” campaign. A lifelong Republican, Bolton has often cited his humble upbringing as the son of a union firefighter and growing up in blue-collar Baltimore as important aspects of his social DNA.
By 1970, he had obtained his baccalaureate degree en route to the juris doctorate he obtained in 1974. Bolton was a newlywed at the time, and as his enlistment in the Army National Guard was set to wind down along with the war effort.
He once offended North Korea’s Supreme Leader
Announcement of the nomination of John Bolton as the US Ambassador to the United Nations. (Wikimedia Commons)
Bolton — who has critics on both sides of the aisle — was a member of the delegation responsible for negotiating the terms of a potential nuclear deal with North Korea during the Bush years. In one assignment, he was a chief diplomat who worked with 60 other countries in to establish the Proliferation Security Initiative.
As undersecretary of arms at the State Department, he had helped spearhead efforts at a peaceful resolution, until he labeled Pyongyang’s language as “bereft of reason, [and] therefore, [Kim Jong Il’s] remarks do no deserve even a passing note.” He also called Kim a “tyrannical dictator” over a country where “life is a hellish nightmare.”
That angered the late Supreme Leader and upset even Democrats back home, causing further friction between the two nations.
He has called Obama a ‘Post-American president’
Following his departure from the Bush Administration, Bolton linked up with conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute where he became a senior fellow and continued his research on nuclear non-proliferation.
In a 2010 book that contemplated how President Obama may be anti-American, he wrote the foreword ahead of passages claiming Obama was “damaging the office of the presidency,” “blaming America for 9/11,” “enabling Iran’s Islamic bomb,” and “destroying America’s prestige,” among other critiques.
Not long after, he played the role of advisor in 2012 to Mitt Romney, who is also in the running for the secretary of state position. Were he named to the post, he would bring a wealth of think tank experience and foreign policy chops to the president-elect implement his “America First” agenda abroad.