Flouting the James Mattis “duty of silence” rule, which stipulates that former presidential advisers should refrain from shit-talking the boss, John Bolton, who publicly and dramatically split with Donald Trump last week, spent an entire luncheon Wednesday ripping an unnamed “high authority” who made his life a living hell inside the White House.

Before a room full of Trump allies at a Gatestone Institute luncheon, including billionaire conservative-media baroness Rebekah Mercer, defense superlawyer Alan Dershowitz, and Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, Bolton repeatedly dunked on the White House’s foreign policy misadventures during his tenure, saying that he’d tried to fight all their poor decisions but was thwarted by a certain someone. According to Politico, Bolton said that inviting the Taliban to Camp David was a “terrible signal” and “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11; that pursuing a peace deal with the Taliban “doesn’t make any sense”; and that any negotiations with Iran and North Korea were “doomed to failure,” believing that all they wanted to do was negotiate for sanctions relief. “He ripped Trump, without using his name, several times,” one attendee reportedly said.

Though Bolton and Trump had bonded over their shared taste for liberal tears, they frequently butted heads over foreign policy once Bolton joined the White House, with Bolton maintaining a zealot’s obsession with the application of military force against all of America’s enemies, and Trump, the wavering foreign policy dilettante, more inclined to bow than hit back in the presence of dictators. (At one point, Trump even seemed to side with Kim Jong Un after North Korea called Bolton a “warmonger.”) After a predictable breakup, Trump attempted to control the narrative, calling Bolton a “Mr. Tough Guy” who was “so tough he got us into Iraq.” Bolton, for his part, offered a slightly more pointed critique, saying the administration failed to contain Iranian aggression, leading to their alleged attack earlier this week on a Saudi Arabian oil facility. More details via Politico:

After the attack in June, Trump was poised to launch a military response against the Iranians—strongly urged by Bolton—but pulled back after Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others warned him that it was a bad idea.

During Wednesday’s luncheon, Bolton said the planned response had gone through the full process and everybody in the White House had agreed on the retaliatory strike.

But “a high authority, at the very last minute," without telling anyone, decided not to do it, Bolton complained.

Mercer herself introducing Bolton, who’d reportedly been scheduled to speak prior to his West Wing defenestration, as “the best national-security adviser our country could have hoped for”; during the Q&A session after his remarks, Dershowitz called Bolton’s ejection a “national disaster.” Trump, meanwhile, was busy showing off his new national-security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, boasting that the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs was the perfect man. “Mr. O’Brien is highly respected,” he told reporters on the tarmac in front of Air Force One, with the classically handsome, uncontroversial, unrumpled O’Brien standing next to him. “I think we have a very good chemistry together, and I think we’re going to have a great relationship.”

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