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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by our most regular and loved guest, Jacob Harbrun, who is editor of the national interest. And we're going to be talking about the sudden departure of John Bolton.

Now, Jacob, it's unclear at the moment whether Bolton was fired or whether he resigned.

It seems Trump is trying to sort of heavily implied he fired him.

And Bolton is trying to say he resigned.

And it's already a Twitter spat. And we'll probably see this sort of rolling out a bit more in the next few days.

What was your first reaction when you heard the news?

A brilliant move by Trump to distract from all of his foreign policy woes and his domestic difficulties.

Washington Post poll today had him sinking from 44% approval in June,

down by six points now to 38.

Coupled that with the demise of the Afghanistan peace talks,

and Trump had to find a sacrificial lamb, which is clearly

Bolton, and he gets to distract the entire news media for at least a day or two.

Well, it's interesting that it should be about Afghanistan, that Afghanistan should be the

final straw because as far as I understood, Bolton and Trump were on roughly similar pages there, whereas

they weren't on such similar pages on things like Iran and whether to attack Iran.

I mean, it seems Trump was very cross that he had to say that the peace talks were dead.

Presumably this means he blamed Bolton for this.

Well, it's clear that Bolton seems never to have met an agreement or treaty that he liked

...