US President Donald Trump again blasted his former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, this time calling him a "jerk" over the latter's comments about POTUS's attitude toward North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. In an interview with NPR given as a part of a promotional tour for his explosive memoir "The Room Where It Happened", Bolton alleged that Trump sees his relations with the DPRK chief as some kind of romance where the president gets to "break up with the girl first" if anything goes wrong.
"Well, he said that he always, back in the day, as they say, he always wanted to be the one who broke up with the girl first. He used that to describe whether he would cancel the summit with Kim Jong-un first or whether we would risk the North Koreans cancelling it. I thought it was an insight into the president, candidly given, that showed how he approached this", Bolton said at the time.
Now, several months later, Trump again brought up the comment by his former adviser, declaring that "Wacko John Bolton" is incorrect. Trump claimed he never treated his ties to the DPRK leader as "love", despite praising Kim Jong-Un for sending him "beautiful letters" and stating publicly at the time that they "fell in love".
"Just heard that Wacko John Bolton was talking of the fact that I discussed “love letters from Kim Jong-Un” as though I viewed them as just that. Obviously, was just being sarcastic. Bolton was such a jerk!" Trump tweeted.
Despite achieving certain breakthroughs in US relations with the DPRK and its leader during a summit in Singapore, progress has since stalled following an unsuccessful summit in Hanoi, which ended prematurely due to the North Korean delegation leaving early. Trump blamed the fiasco on Bolton and his pressure on Pyongyang to ditch all nuclear weapons prior to negotiating terms of normalisation of ties and lifting sanctions. Trump hinted that the failure of his talks with the DPRK leader was one reason he fired his national security adviser.