Bolton, Fresh From Fox News, Joins the Trump Cast

Less than an hour after President Donald Trump named John R. Bolton as his new national security adviser on Thursday, Bolton made an appearance in the venue where many Americans, including Trump, have come to know him over the past decade: Fox News.

“I think I still am a Fox News contributor,” Bolton, laughing, told the host Martha MacCallum at the start of a previously scheduled interview.

“No,” MacCallum clarified. “You’re not.”

You can’t blame him for being a bit confused.

Bolton — a featured commentator on Fox News since 2007, after his term as ambassador to the United Nations — is the third TV personality in the past eight days to join Trump’s it-came-from-the-small-screen White House team.

The president last week tapped Larry Kudlow, the CNBC commentator, to be his chief economic adviser. On Monday, he hired Joseph E. diGenova, a Washington lawyer who drew Trump’s attention on Fox News, where he described — without evidence — “a brazen plot” by FBI agents to frame the president for a crime.

Trump, a television connoisseur and former reality star, regularly turns to TV personalities as an informal sounding board. He speaks often with the Fox News anchors Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, dined recently with their colleague Jesse Watters and tweeted a shout-out this week to the veteran anchor Lou Dobbs.

But the elevation of Bolton is the latest sign that Trump is determined to pluck his favorite TV faces from their studios and place them in positions of serious consequence in U.S. government.

Heather Nauert, a former “Fox & Friends” anchor, was recently promoted to a high-ranking position in the State Department. Pete Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” has been mentioned as a candidate for secretary of Veterans Affairs, though his chances of being confirmed by Congress could be low. The trend has not gone unnoticed.

“Was on Fox immediately before Bolton yesterday,” John McCormack, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, tweeted Thursday, “so assume I’ll be named to a high-level Cabinet post soon.”

Bolton’s hard-line on-air presence has long pleased Trump.

“He’s, you know, a tough cookie,” Trump, then a presidential candidate, told NBC News in 2015, naming Bolton as one of his sources for national security advice. “Knows what he’s talking about.”

Since Trump took office, Bolton has used his Fox News platform to praise the president and castigate his critics. He described Trump’s address last year to the United Nations as “the best speech of the Trump presidency.”

“It’s safe to say, in the entire history of the United Nations, there has never been a more straightforward criticism of the unacceptable behavior of other member states,” Bolton said. (On Thursday, Fox News said Bolton would no longer be a paid contributor to the network.) The coterie of TV figures in the White House has fueled rumors that others may soon follow. On Thursday, there was speculation that Eric Bolling, a former Fox News host, might want to work for the president.

Bolling, who received a warm reception at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, acknowledged the rumors with a tweet that, to some eyes, doubled as a job application.

“I’d work for a single US $1 to help drain the swamp, plug the leaks, build the wall with Pesos, lower taxes, build infrastructure, protect #2A and save some parents from the scourge of opioids,” Bolling wrote. “But that would mean working directly with POTUS, not near him.”

Reached by phone Thursday evening, Bolling laughed — but declined to elaborate.

“My tweet,” he said, slyly, “speaks for itself.”