Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton warned Republican primary candidates that they are “risking political suicide” if they align themselves too closely with the former president.
“Trump’s fixation on himself and the 2020 election are poisonous to independent and undecided voters,” Bolton said in a statement last week after the John Bolton Super PAC released the Trump-ominous findings of its political survey.
“Independents’ opposition to Trump could give Democrats outright Senate control,” the PAC warned in a statement last Thursday.
The PAC’s poll of likely voters in the nation and in four key Senate battleground states — Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — indicate that Trump is a “significant drag” on the general-election chances of GOP candidates, noted the statement.
Independent and undecided voters — “whose votes will be critical” — have “decidedly unfavorable views of Trump,” the PAC underscored. Republican candidates are currently trailing in all but Georgia, according to the survey results.
“Republican candidates who hope to win in November are risking political suicide if they stress their closeness to Trump — or allow their opponents to portray them as mini-Trumps,” Bolton said in his statement.
Bolton urged conservative candidates to “separate themselves from Trump,” and instead “stress their loyalty” to “principles.”
Whatever Trump’s role in the nominating process, his role in the coming general elections can be “fatal to GOP efforts” to gain control of the Senate, Bolton warned.
Detailed results of the poll are available here and here.
The hawkish Bolton initially appeared as sycophantic as the next guy in the Trump administration when he began as national security adviser in 2018. But after clashes over foreign policy, Trump announced his firing in a pair of tweets the following year.
Bolton shocked the public two weeks ago when he casually mentioned on CNN that he had helped plan coups d’etat against foreign governments. “It takes a lot of work,” he told host Jake Tapper.
He offered few details.
The only example Bolton mentioned was the Trump administration’s efforts to support Venezuelan opposition against President Nicolas Maduro, which “turned out not to be successful,” he conceded.