In the span of 10 dramatic days in March, President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and replaced them with C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo and infamous Bush official John Bolton, respectively, setting up his White House for a titanic clash of martial personalities. Both Pompeo and Bolton are hardliners, though with distinctly different office politics. Bolton, despite his avuncular mustachioed appearance, is an unrepentant champion of foreign intervention who has advocated violent regime change in Tehran and Pyongyang. Pompeo, a former Army officer, also sees diplomacy as bloodsport. When he first met with Kim Jong Un in North Korea in April, a former Pompeo staffer told me, the North Korean dictator immediately challenged Pompeo, who previously suggested North Koreans “would love to see [Kim] go.” But Pompeo didn’t flinch. The C.I.A. director joked that he was still trying to kill him, this former staffer said, and both men laughed.

The near simultaneous addition of Bolton and Pompeo was expected to create conflict in a White House where membership in Trump’s inner circle is limited by backstabbing and mutual distrust between participants. “There has always been institutional tension between the national security adviser and the Cabinet,” Lawrence Wilkerson, a former Army colonel who served in the second Bush administration alongside Bolton, told me—a dynamic he suggested would lead to both men ultimately falling out of Trump’s favor. “I’ve said several times to people, some of my colleagues, I don’t expect Bolton to last much longer—or Pompeo, for that matter, to last much longer than Tillerson or McMaster.” Other sources previously told me that Bolton’s physical proximity to the president in the West Wing gives him an edge over Pompeo. “The national security adviser has a built in advantage,” a former senior N.S.C. official who served in multiple administrations told me recently. “They see the president every day—and sometimes multiple times every day—so they will always have an advantage, in that their voice will be the one heard first, last, and most frequently.” (Pompeo has dismissed reports of tensions between him and Bolton as “unfounded” and a “complete joke.”)

After the crucible of the Trump-Kim summit, however, it seems clear that Bolton has been diminished, and Pompeo empowered, by the president’s sudden love affair with Pyongyang. The photo op almost didn’t happen, after all, following Bolton’s ill-advised remark about North Korea adhering to the “Libya model”—a reference that North Korean officials took as a threat. (Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was famously run out of power and executed in the streets after agreeing to dismantle his weapons program—a fate that Kim is particularly sensitive to avoid.) North Korean officials responded angrily, characterizing the comparison as “absurd” and “awfully sinister,” and Bolton was seemingly benched. Though he ultimately attended the summit in Singapore, Bolton’s absence from an Oval Office meeting between Trump and a top North Korean official, Kim Yong Chol, days before the meeting on June 12, was particularly noteworthy. “I don't think the North Koreans would’ve requested Bolton not to be there. That would be very, very diplomatically odd given that they're coming to our house for a meeting, for a meeting on our turf,” a current administration official told me, suggesting that Bolton’s absence was deliberate. “I think that was more of a Pompeo move to try to keep things positive. But that certainly is also a power play in and of itself, right? Because if [Bolton] is not in the room, he doesn’t know what happened, he has to hear from Pompeo through his lens.”

Bolton’s defenders say that his job is to implement policy, not to set it. But among his former colleagues, Bolton’s limited role in the North Korea talks came as a surprise. “It must be galling for him,” a former State Department official told me, reflecting on how Bolton found himself playing second fiddle to Pompeo. “He should be the top dog on this.” Bolton, who has long maintained that North Korea cannot be trusted in any nuclear negotiations, must have been dying to have a bigger role in the talks, this person said. “He would be especially eager to be there because he would be at the top of the list of worrying that Trump would give away the store.” Indeed, Bolton has made no public comment since last week, when Trump promised to suspend joint military exercises with South Korea as part of an agreement to begin talks centered on denuclearization. (The White House dismissed the narrative that Bolton was sidelined. “There is no daylight between the president’s policy and that of the ambassador,” National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said.)

“The devil is always going to be in the details. No one’s going to be surprised if this thing goes to shit.”

Bolton had previously argued, in January, that North Korea was merely “[playing on] the gullibility of American political leaders to make it look like they’re somehow trying to open a channel of communication,” and said Trump should move more troops into the area. In early March, shortly before joining the White House, Bolton insisted that Kim was “lying” about denuclearization. “I think this is potentially a meeting that begins and ends with the president saying, ‘Tell me what you’re going to do to denuclearize,’ and Kim Jong Un saying, ‘Well, we’ll have talks about this and talks about that,’” he told Fox News. “So it could be a long and unproductive meeting, or it could be a short and unproductive meeting.”