Did Trump Know About Bolton Raid or Not?

On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered a series of confusing comments about that morning’s FBI raid on the home of his onetime national security adviser John Bolton.

The president told reporters that he was not yet briefed on the raid on the Maryland residence of Bolton, who is a vocal critic of the president’s decision-making, character, and mental acuity.

“I saw it on television this morning,” Trump said, quickly adding: “I’m not a fan of John Bolton. He’s a real, sort of a low life.… He’s not a smart guy. He could be a very unpatriotic guy.”

Since his contentious 17-month stint in Trump’s first administration, Bolton has repeatedly drawn his former boss’s ire—including for publishing a 2020 tell-all, In the Room Where It Happened, which described Trump as incompetent and unfit for office. Trump’s first-term Justice Department investigated Bolton over the book, claiming it contained classified information. Similarly, Friday’s raid, per NBC, was part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.”

During his remarks about Bolton, Trump also made a point to assert that he “could” have hypothetically been the one who ordered the search but insisted this was done by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department.

In doing so, the president sounded not unlike a Mafia boss describing how he insulates himself from misdeeds.

“I tell Pam [Bondi], and I tell the group, ‘I don’t want to know, but just—you have to do what you have to do.’ I don’t want to know about it. It’s not necessary,” Trump said, adding, “I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer, but I feel that it’s better this way.”

Here, Trump all but admitted to borrowing a page from England’s King Henry II, who is said to have uttered, regarding the archbishop of Canterbury, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”—and thereby enjoyed plausible deniability when his underlings killed the man vexing him.

It’s not the first time Trump has sounded like a mob boss or a monarch. And it surely won’t be the last time the administration seemingly wields the government against those deemed guilty of lèse-majesté against him.

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer complained to State Secretary Marco Rubio about U.S. support for injured Gazan children. Then the aid stopped.

The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the safety of her X account: At least 16 individuals have been fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out as covert Democratic agents. But the unelected provocateur’s reach apparently extends far beyond snipping federal payrolls and into crafting and implementing foreign policy.

Over the last several weeks, Loomer had become fixated on a small number of injured Palestinian children who had arrived in the United States by way of a charity called Heal Palestine for medical treatment related to their injuries of war. The wounded kids suffered from missing limbs, severe burns, and other dire medical needs, but the McCarthy-esque agitator was unsympathetic.

Loomer openly vilified them on social media, referring to the children as “Islamic invaders” and their presence in the U.S. as a “national security threat.” She called on the White House to fire the State Department employee who authorized the children’s visas.

Last Friday, Loomer claimed that she had elevated her concerns to the agency by speaking directly with Rubio. The next day, the State Department paused all visitor visas from Gaza.

“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the agency’s official X account announced.

Rubio defended the decision the following day.

“First of all, it’s not just kids,” Rubio told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan. “It’s a bunch of adults that are accompanying them. Second, we had outreach from multiple congressional offices asking questions about it, and so we’re going to reevaluate how those visas are being granted.”

Loomer, an apparently proud bigot, has often used her social media influence to flaunt and advance her racist and Islamaphobic viewpoints. But her recent proximity to Donald Trump—which she describes as a “friendship”—has hoisted her intolerant and hateful ideologies into the throng of the federal government, contorting critical national and international decisions as little more than a private citizen.

It’s been almost a year since President Donald Trump targeted Springfield, Ohio, with racist lies that Haitian immigrants had begun eating their neighbors’ pets in order to stir up his voter base. Now, the city’s Haitian immigrants, who helped revive Springfield’s struggling economy, are being chased out by Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

Springfield is currently home to an estimated 10,000-15,000 Haitian immigrants, but The New York Times reported Friday that dozens have already fled the city—and more are sure to follow.

The wave of Haitian immigration had helped Springfield, a town of just 60,000, rebound, the Times reported. Now, all that could go away.

The Trump administration has already ended some humanitarian programs that allowed Haitians to live and work legally in the United States, leaving local employers with no choice but to dismiss scores of workers. A nearby Amazon warehouse, a major employer in the area, was forced to dismiss hundreds of employees in June. The Times reported that a local food pantry at the local nonprofit St. Vincent de Paul had received twice as many Haitians families as usual on a recent Tuesday.

Thousands more Haitians are expected to lose work in February 2026, when the administration plans to end Temporary Protected Status, which prevents their deportation.

And the more Haitian immigrants are forced to lean on social services, or fill up emergency rooms because they lack access to health insurance, the more likely it is that politicians will use these changes to stoke the same issues that Trump preyed upon: scarcity and sickness.

Vice President JD Vance pushed rumors on the campaign trail that the city’s new arrivals had contributed to the spread of communicable diseases, though local health officials said there had been no discernable increase in those illnesses.

In July, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who’d refuted but refused to condemn Trump’s racist lies last year, said that “suddenly losing a large number” of workers would have a “significant impact” on businesses. “It’s not going to be good,” he said.

Now, Haitian immigrants face three options. They could go back to Haiti, which is still plagued by widespread violence, or attempt to gain asylum elsewhere, such as Canada. Or they could remain without lawful status, facing steep economic hurdles, as targets for Trump’s massive deportation scheme.

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser turned vocal Trump critic, is the latest target of the president’s weaponization of the government against his political adversaries.

On Friday morning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Maryland home of Bolton, whose 17-month stint under the president was characterized by stark foreign policy disagreements until it abruptly ended.

NBC News reports that the raid is part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records”—accusations that echo Trump’s previous attempts to wield the government to silence and punish Bolton for supposedly sharing classified information in his 2020 tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened, which described Trump as incompetent and unfit for the presidency.

Bolton frequently issues scathing criticisms of Trump. In March 2024, he said the then candidate “hasn’t got the brains” to be a dictator. Months later, he said that, while Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist,” he lacks the thoughtfulness to fit the bill: “To be a fascist, you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that,” he said.

Last August, Bolton said Trump doesn’t lie a lot, “because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference.” This February, he told CNN the president’s “mind is full of mush.”

He also regularly lays into the president for his perceived friendliness toward Russia in its war against Ukraine. In 2022, he called Trump a “useful idiot” for Putin.

And just last week, Bolton incensed the president by saying he had, in arranging his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin, handed the Russian president a victory.

Bolton’s barbs have, of course, not been ignored.

Trump, for example, called the ex–national security adviser “really dumb” and a loser for his latest criticisms. And after meeting with Putin, Trump blamed “stupid people like” Bolton for “mak[ing] it much harder” to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

On Friday, top Trump officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, seemed to gloat about the FBI raid in oblique posts on X.

This latest instance of lawfare comes as the Trump administration escalates its attacks against other political opponents—most recently training its sights on Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. This is not to mention Trump’s threats to launch even more retributive legal attacks against his perceived foe Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, among others.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Friday that the Trump administration would stop issuing work visas for commercial truck drivers.

“The increasing number of foreign drivers operating large tractor-trailer trucks on U.S. roads is endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers,” Rubio wrote in a post on X, announcing the new policy. 

The decision appears to be spurred by a recent traffic accident in Florida that officials have described as an alleged “vehicular homicide.” A commercial truck driver was arrested earlier this month after allegedly attempting to make an unauthorized U-turn, resulting in a crash that killed three people. Because the driver, Harjinder Singh, was an undocumented immigrant from India, Republicans have been quick to politicize the accident. 

Florida Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom for the crash on Thursday, because Singh had received his commercial driver’s license in California after illegally entering the United States from Mexico. “Three lives lost because of Gavin Newsom, because of California’s failed policies,” Collins said, according to Fox News. “We’re done with that shit.”

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin was also quick to point the finger at Newsom, writing on X Monday, “How many more innocent people have to die before @GavinNewsom stops playing games with the safety of the American public?”  

It’s not clear what Singh’s country of origin or immigration status could possibly have to do with his driving abilities, but that’s not stopping the Trump administration from using the fatal accident in Florida as justification to punish all immigrants. 

Rubio’s decision comes amid a national shortage of commercial truck drivers. The industry is struggling with a shortage of about 60,000 drivers, according to trade group the American Trucking Association. 

Foreign-born drivers make up about 18 percent of the total commercial truck driver workforce as of October 2024, according to the National Association of Truck Stop Owners, citing Labor Department data.