US President Donald Trump. Photo: Reuters / Leah Millis.

The list of controversial personalities retweeted by President Donald Trump gained one more name on Thursday, when the US leader shared a strident attack on his former National Security Adviser John Bolton that was posted to the social media platform by an antisemitic writer.

The tweet by Max Blumenthal — a far-left US-based journalist whose writings accuse American Jews of having conflicting dual loyalties and tar Israel as a Nazi-like state — described Bolton as “a notoriously mendacious enemy of all living beings on the planet.”

The tweet echoed one of Trump’s core rhetorical themes in its conclusion that “liberals will eagerly lap up any piece of hysterical Cold War propaganda if they think it can be leveraged against Trump.”

Bolton’s much-anticipated memoir of his 17 months as the president’s national security adviser before he was fired last September has been repeatedly denounced and ridiculed by Trump on his Twitter feed this week, while lawyers for the administration are attempting to block its release on June 23.

It is unclear whether Trump was aware that Max Blumenthal is the son of Sidney Blumenthal — a close confidante of his bitter rival in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton. In one of his pre-election debates with Clinton, Trump accused Sidney Blumenthal of having originated the discredited conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, rather than the US.

Meanwhile, Max Blumenthal’s output has included a 2013 tome excoriating Zionism and Israel that one critic dismissed as a “candidate for the Hamas book-of-the-month club.”

He has been a vocal supporter of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, as well as Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon.

More recently, Blumenthal has been advocating on behalf of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, whose human rights violations and abuse of the democratic process led the US, the European Union and several other countries to withdraw recognition of his regime in January 2019.

During his lengthy television interview with Maduro last August — which began with Blumenthal castigating the mass democracy protests in Venezuela — the Venezuelan leader claimed that Bolton wanted to “assassinate” him.

As well as Max Blumenthal, Trump has approvingly shared the tweets of other extremists, including Katie Hopkins, an anti-Muslim activist, and Britain First, a white supremacist group.