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John Bolton doesn’t see Vice President JD Vance as President Donald Trump’s heir apparent.
After Tuesday’s humbling defeat, questions have emerged about the future of the Republican Party and who will lead it. The former national security adviser told Newsweek he is skeptical that Vance is the right man to take over the movement that has transformed the American right for more than a decade.
"So, the aberration here is Trump, and he has been the difference," Bolton said of the party’s turn from conservatism toward MAGA. "JD Vance is aberration number two, but JD Vance doesn’t control the base the way Trump does."
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Bolton, who served in Trump’s White House from 2018 until he was fired in 2019, now expects two lame-duck years and a crowded fight for the 2028 nomination. To him, the Republican losses just confirmed what had been happening to Trump’s base for a while.
"He said repeatedly, pretend my name is on the ballot, and people were happy to do that," Bolton said. "It was a referendum and it was a sweeping rejection."
While the outlook for the Republican Party is grim for the moment, Bolton sees an opening ahead after voters rejected Trump and MAGA so strongly.
"His base is collapsing," he said.
Vance Blames Iran. Bolton Blames the Pump
Vance issued a lengthy social media post blaming the unpopular conflict with Iran for the GOP’s humbling defeat, in which Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress, along with several governorships. Bolton doesn’t buy it, and points to Trump’s lack of strategy over the conflict.
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"I don’t think it was the war that cost him, cost Trump the midterms," he said. "If he had ever acted once since February that he cared about the issue, I think his problems would have been considerably less."
For voters, he argued, the conflict came down to what they paid at gas stations. "The war to most people means higher gasoline prices," Bolton said. "It’s not a rejection of the idea that Iran needs to be constrained in the Middle East. It has nothing to do with foreign policy, really."
Exit polling backs part of that view. Only about one-third of voters said the war in Iran was "crucial" to their vote for Congress, well below the roughly half who said that about the cost of living or government corruption, according to The AP Voter Poll.
Bolton, who has been labeled one of the most hawkish advisers in Washington, has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan’s. He supported the operation that led to the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but as months passed, he grew more impatient with the lack of strategy that followed.
"Trump didn’t have any strategy," he said. "You can’t to this day state what his objective was. He can’t even do it. He doesn’t know."
Trump never consulted the Iranian opposition, U.S. allies, Congress or the American public before launching the strikes, Bolton said, and "put himself into a trap of his own making."
As the midterm defeat sets off speculation in Washington about who could be pushed out of the administration, much of it has centered on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a key architect of Trump’s unpopular war with Iran who could be a top target of congressional Democrats.
Bolton places the blame higher up.
"Decisions of war and peace are the president and the president alone, basically," he said. "It’s a typical Trump response when something goes wrong to say, well, that guy over there did it and I’m not responsible."
In Trump’s first term, Bolton said, aides from both domestic and foreign policy teams would push back and raise alternatives before decisions were made. In the second, Trump surrounded himself with people who would just say "yes, sir."
"People can point to Hegseth as saying, yes sir, too quickly," Bolton said, "but it’s not Hegseth’s fault that he was doing what Trump wanted."
Two Years of ‘Trench Warfare’
Bolton was part of the Trump administration when Republicans suffered a major defeat in 2018, losing the House. While the defeat was bigger in 2026, he doesn’t expect it to change much abroad.
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"In the foreign affairs area, it’s not likely to be too much different," he said. "Congress has very limited authority there, primarily budgetary."
Democrats will still try to assert themselves, Bolton said, though he sees most of that fight happening in committee rooms. Trump also signaled he isn’t leaving without a fight, naming Stephen Miller, the architect of his hard-line immigration agenda, as his new chief of staff in place of Susie Wiles.
"You’re gonna have the political equivalent of two years of hand-to-hand combat and trench warfare," Bolton said, as Democrats investigate the administration all the way back to Trump’s first term, with a focus on allegations of corruption, self-dealing and self-enrichment.
"I think it’s going to be a very partisan atmosphere, and I don’t see much happening one way or the other productive," he said.
On the world stage, Trump keeps most of his room to maneuver.
"I think it’s going to be hard to constrain Trump in international affairs, where the Constitution clearly gives the president the predominant role," Bolton said.
Where Bolton does see change coming is inside his own party. Republican support for NATO stretches back to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, he said, and Trump’s hostility toward the alliance never reflected the mainstream of Republicans in Congress.
"As the lame duck status takes effect, more and more Republicans will say we need to support NATO, we need to repair the damage that Trump has done," he said. "And we need to get on with that pretty quickly."
What Trump Is Willing to Give Away
Bolton isn’t worried about another war, as other conservative personalities like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have warned. Two years out from leaving office, he thinks Trump has a different prize in mind, one he has been chasing since his first administration.
"I think what Trump wants more than anything else in international affairs is the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, he’s made that about as clear as you can," he said. "And the question is, what is he willing to give away to get it?"
In 2025, Trump lambasted the Norwegian Nobel Committee after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the prize. Bolton has spent years saying the president is "obsessed" with winning it. In his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, he wrote that South Korean President Moon Jae-in had promised to nominate Trump for the prize amid the president’s diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
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Ukraine is one place to watch, Bolton says. He pointed to recent talk of new ideas for a peace agreement that, in his view, sounds a lot like Trump and Putin agreeing on terms and handing them to Kyiv on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
Trump sounded confident about a deal in a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday. "I believe we’re very close to making a deal," he said, adding that Ukraine would "end up with a little bit different shape." Asked whether Putin was stringing him along, Trump said, "Oh, I don’t think so."
U.S., Russian and Ukrainian envoys are set to meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for their first talks since February.
China is another. Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in Shenzhen later this month and again at the G20 summit in Miami in December. Putin is expected to attend the Shenzhen meeting, and officials have discussed the possibility of a three-way interaction, though nothing has been confirmed.
Bolton said he sees plenty for both leaders to exploit in a weakened president.
"If I were Xi or Putin, I would be saying to myself, how am I gonna use the next two years to get the most I can out of Trump?" he said. "And that’s what worries me more than anything else."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Trevor Davies
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