President Donald Trump continues to publicly support his long-time ally Mike Flynn, but privately he thinks the disgraced former general acts like a “loser.”
Multiple sources told Zeteo that Trump thinks Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, comes across as erratic and unserious, with one source saying the president has called his former adviser “sort of a f---ing loser.”
Flynn served as a national security adviser to Trump during his first presidential campaign—a role he held for just three weeks after it was revealed that he had lied about conversations he’d had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.
He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI, but Trump later pardoned him after he worked his way back into the White House fold by meeting with the president to discuss ideas for overturning President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.
During the Biden administration, Flynn resurfaced as a proponent of Christian nationalism, organizing a national tour urging people to join the “spiritual war” and “political war”—and continuing to insist that Trump had won in 2020, the AP reported.
Trump had vowed that, if he reclaimed the White House in 2024, he would reward his fellow deniers with cushy government jobs, Zeteo noted.
Earlier this year, Trump appeared at a gala hosted by America’s Future, a right-wing organization chaired by Flynn, and said he had offered Flynn “about ten jobs,” Talking Points Memo reported.
The president also praised Flynn during a March speech at the Justice Department, according to The Washington Post.
Nearly a year after returning to the White House, though, Trump has only appointed Flynn to the Board of Visitors for West Point, the nation’s oldest military academy. The boards give input on finances, teaching methods, and academic curricula, but they’re mainly advisory.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Flynn, however, is also in talks with the Justice Department to receive a $50 million settlement for wrongful prosecution, Bloomberg reported last month. He has tried—so far unsuccessfully—to bring a suit for civil damages.
Over the summer, Flynn finally broke with Trump on a key issue that has divided MAGA: the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The Justice Department announced in July that an exhaustive review of the evidence had concluded the late sex offender did not keep a client list and had died by suicide while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking.
The news unleashed rage within the MAGA ranks, who have long believed Epstein was murdered as part of a deep-state plot to protect his powerful associates.
Flynn was among the chorus of usually pro-Trump voices warning the president that, “If there are elites inside of our country that committed crimes against CHILDREN (shame on them)... they MUST be held ACCOUNTABLE.”
“With my strongest recommendation, please gather your team and figure out a way to move past this,” Flynn wrote in a 500-word post on X. “The roll out of this was terrible, no way around that. Americans want America to be successful, therefore, WE NEED YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.”
Trump, who was close friends with Epstein for more than a decade, spent months trying to prevent the files’ release. Facing mutiny from a growing number of his own party members, he finally gave his blessing last month for Congress to vote to release the files.
