John Bolton: Trump will 'absolutely' call the midterms stolen

Ambassador John Bolton was Donald Trump's national security advisor in his first administration, but has since fallen out with the president, as so many others have done as well. And he joins me now as we try to throw forward and work out what impact a bad day in the midterms would have for the rest of this presidency. Ambassador, great to have you on the show. Can I start by asking for your gut feeling about how the night is going to play out? Well, I think it's going to be a very bad night for Trump, and by definition, the Republicans, Trump has gone out of his way to take what is normally a real disadvantage in midterm elections, namely that he is the president in power and people are looking for ways to express their displeasure with the way things are after two years. He said, please pretend that I'm on the ballot. Make it a referendum about me, which the Democrats happily obliged. He wanted a referendum. He's going to get it good and hard, as they say. I think Republicans will lose control of the House for certain. The only question is the margin. And I think it's nearly that bad in the Senate. The margin there depends, I think, on what could be some close races. But I think when the counting is done, and I wouldn't count on that happening too soon, depending on Trump's reaction, but when we know the results, it will be a very good night for the Democrats. Do you think this might make him reconsider those hints he's put out about trying to stand for an unconstitutional third term? No, I don't think so. I think he understands, although doesn't like the notion that he really can't get a third term. And I believe he's been told if you try, you will fail. And since, as we know, life is divided into winners and losers. Trump is a winner. He doesn't want to go out losing. So he'll grouse about it. I don't think he'll try for a third term. The real question in And in the next weeks... Will he, as in 2020, claim that many of the House and Senate elections were stolen, try to overturn the recount, try and create turmoil in different states, and prevent a new Democratic majority from organizing when the new Congress comes in in early January? That is something people are watching for. I don't... He's tried a number of legal tactics before the election. Federal courts have blocked basically all of them. So we're looking at what happens later today or beginning overnight and tomorrow morning. Are new court actions coming? Is there going to be an effort to claim the election was stolen? That's really interesting. You know the man pretty close up. How do you think he would react if he gets some kind of big thumping in these election results, something that's too difficult to kind of smooth over or spin as any kind of success? What does that change in terms of his presidency? Well, the first is he will claim it's stolen, and then we set off on an alternative reality scenario. Second, even if he contemplates defeat, it wasn't his fault. We know that. The issue is who gets the finger pointed at them and gets thrown out or has other adverse consequences. I think Trump will try some way to slip through this without admitting, really, that anything big happened. It'll be a complete contrast to George W. Bush in 2006 when... Republicans lost both houses of Congress in a midterm, and Trump said, we took a thumping. That was his phrase exactly, and he took responsibility for it, which is what the real leader of a party does. That isn't going to happen here. We've had an awful lot of conversation already about this strange story, I think it came out via Tucker Carlson originally, that Trump was considering using a nuclear bomb to finally finish off the Iranian nuclear facility under that mountain. You've always been pretty, you know, hardline on Iran, but do you think that was a stage too far? Do you believe any of it? I don't believe any of it. Look, dealing with Pickaxe Mountain is going to be hard. It's a big hunk of granite, and the Iranians have learned a lot about deeply buried and hardened targets. But you don't deal with that problem by dropping a nuclear weapon on the top of the mountain. It'll blow a big chunk of the mountain off it, but there'll still be an awful lot of granite between the sky and the tunnels underneath. I think that was sensationalism and about par for for the course for Tucker. Nonetheless, it's pretty clear from what Donald Trump has said that he's thinking about a really pretty aggressive, very fast, very hard resumption of the war on Iran. Would you like to see that happen? Well, he may be or he may not be. Look, I'd like to know what our objective is. I think there's a very good argument for regime change. Trump hasn't made it. I don't know what he thinks he's going to do. I think as of tomorrow morning, the choices are two. One, he can resume strikes intensively, like with the Israelis. Or two, he can declare victory and go home. or anything in between. I don't know what he's going to do. And let me say, I have high confidence neither does Donald Trump. He has thought about the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz simply in terms of the price of energy to American consumers. That is because of the election we're having right now. Tomorrow, he's got something else to think about, and then he'll make up his mind. That's how it's going to work. Well, we've had this conversation and everybody is talking today surrounded by a landscape of question marks. We just don't know at this stage, but it's been fascinating anyway. Ambassador Bolton, thank you so much for that. I think it's time to get an assessment of the threat to Iran from someone who actually understands the atmosphere in Tehran. So let's hear now from Trita Parsi, the co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a former informal advisor to the Obama administration on Iran. Trita, thank you very much indeed for joining us again. All these wild threats are pouring out, credible or not. What kind of impact do you think they're going to have? On what is effectively a new government sitting in Tehran, wondering how to handle Donald Trump by the end of this week after these results. Well, there's several different things that have happened in the course of the last year now. One of the most important ones is that the United States, for the first time, actually has had war with Iran. It's tried the military option, and clearly it has not worked. So the potency of the threat of using force against Iran is just not carrying the same weight as it did before. This is part of the reason why... Trump, when he's talking about it now, he's talking about finishing it off. The Israelis are talking about striking at civilian infrastructure, critical infrastructure. So and we heard how Chris Murphy described without going into any details that would violate the confidentiality of the plans or something that would really break any relationship between the United States and international law. So essentially, the plan is a war crimes plan. That tells you something of how. How limited the American options are, the U.S. would not go in this direction of thinking of measures of this kind if previous measures had worked. This has then also created a degree of confidence on the Iranian side that they believe that they've been very effective in repelling American attacks, undermining the U.S.'s position in the region, destroying many of its bases. So you just don't have the same type of equation as before. I mean, Trita, if they're going up, if the idea is to destroy power stations and motorways. hospitals, whatever. It's exactly the kind of tactics used by Putin in Ukraine. And what seems to happen every time you have this kind of attack on the civilian infrastructure is the population, whatever they used to think about their government, rallies to the government involved. So is this just a fundamental misreading of the mood in Iran, do you think? Absolutely. I mean, we also saw that in the previous rounds of the war, that when, and it was in that case, the Israelis, the Israelis, for instance, struck at the desalination plant at Kish Island, the Israelis struck at the refineries outside of Tehran, which then led to a scenario in which you couldn't breathe in the city for about two days. All of those things, if there were people inside of the country that believed that perhaps this would be a liberation, perhaps the Israelis and the Americans would come and get rid of the theocracy and allow for a different government to come into place, I think those were the moments in which, if they hadn't already changed their mind, they changed their mind because they realized that this is actually a war on the country as a whole. And it certainly doesn't help that the Israelis have done exactly this in Gaza and are doing it in Lebanon. And the fact that Trump at times were talking about destroying the Iranian civilization, which is very, very different from saying that you're going to try to save the people from a bad regime. Last time round, when we saw the Iranian response in terms of possible peace talks and the rest of it, it was pretty unflinching, pretty unbowed. It's quite an extreme list of demands. You wouldn't do a deal without this, this, this and this, including on the Strait of Hormuz and reparations and the rest of it. Do you think there is any real prospect of a peace deal coming soon? There is a prospect. It's not necessarily particularly good and the situation is very difficult, but there's also a reality that both sides have walked to the brink of the abyss. They look down and they realize that this is really not going to be good for either one of them. And as a result, that may muster a bit of a political will for the type of flexibility that is needed. Many of the demands, if not all of the demands that the Iranians are putting forward right now are frankly demands that were accepted in the MOU. Well, let us very much hope that you're right about that, Trita Parsi. Thank you so much for talking to LBC today.