On Tuesday night, former US diplomat John Bolton provided what will likely go down as one of the more damning examples of saying the quiet part out loud.

Appearing on Jake Tapper’s prime-time CNN show to discuss the January 6 commission, the bland seventy-three-year-old, whose only distinguishing feature is his bushy white mustache and unbending commitment to US militarism, downplayed the threat that former president Donald Trump posed to US democracy. Trump is, “to use a Star Wars metaphor, a disturbance in the force,” Bolton said. His attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were “not an attack on our democracy. It’s Donald Trump looking out for Donald Trump. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.”

Bolton criticized Trump’s actions, but suggested that their shambolic nature ensured the would-be coup had no plausible chance of succeeding. Tapper pushed back, noting that coordination and intelligence are not prerequisites to a successful putsch. Then came Bolton’s astounding retort: “I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état — not here, but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work. And that’s not what he did. It was just stumbling around from one idea to another.”