Trump says picking 'disloyal people' was 'biggest mistake' of first term

Former President Trump said the “biggest mistake” of his presidency was picking “bad, disloyal people” to join his administration.

“The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people. I picked some great people, you know, but you don't think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn't have picked,” Trump said during his Friday appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “I picked a few people that I shouldn't have picked.”

“Neocons,” Rogan asked.

“Yeah, neocons or bad people or disloyal people,” Trump added.

Trump’s comments on Rogan’s podcast come as his former White House chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, recently told The Atlantic that Trump reportedly praised Adolf Hitler’s generals for their loyalty. Kelly also told The New York Times in an interview that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

In response, the former president called Kelly a “lowlife” and a “total degenerate,” slamming him again during his Friday podcast appearance.

“I mean, look, I mean, you reading about them a little bit today, a guy like Kelly, who is a bully, a bully, but a weak, a weak person, you know, you know more about bullies than anybody probably around because you deal in a certain sport where the bullies are exposed very quickly,” the Republican nominee told Rogan.

During the nearly 3-hour podcast, Trump also called his former national security adviser John Bolton, an “idiot,” but that “he was great for me because I'd go in with a guy like a John Bolton.”

“But he was good in a certain way,” Trump later added on the podcast when talking about Bolton, now a vocal critic of the former president.

“He's a nut job,” Trump continued. “And every time I had to deal with a country, when they saw this whack job standing behind me, they said, ‘oh man, Trump's going to go to war with us.’”