Retired Army 3-star and former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is out with a new book that, shockingly, portrays H.R. McMaster is the hero of the story. There are, of course, plenty of anecdotes about Trump himself but they mostly confirm what we’ve long known.
CNN’s Peter Bergen (“Gen. McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House“):
In his blistering, insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying stuff like, “Your instincts are always right” or, “No one has ever been treated so badly by the press.” Meanwhile, Trump would say “outlandish” things like, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in Mexico or, “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”
[…]
McMaster provides unique detail on Trump’s approach to foreign policy and — similarly to his successor in the national security adviser role, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who wrote scathingly about the former president in a book published in 2020 — his account is likely to do little to reassure US allies about the prospects of a second Trump term.
In addition to being a highly decorated officer, McMaster also has a doctorate in history. His first book, “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam,” recounted the dismal history of how the top American generals told President Lyndon Johnson only what they thought he wanted to hear about the Vietnam War, rather than giving him their best military advice about how the conflict was going and the full range of policy options that were open to their commander in chief.
McMaster wasn’t going to make the same mistake after Trump tapped him to be his national security adviser in February 2017. He writes, “I knew that to fulfill my duty, I would have to tell Trump what he didn’t want to hear.” This helps explain why McMaster lasted just over a year in the job. (Disclosure: I have known McMaster professionally since 2010, when he ran an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan.)
One subject was particularly neuralgic for Trump: Russia. McMaster astutely observes, “I wished that Trump could separate the issue of Russian election meddling from the legitimacy of his presidency. He could have said, ‘Yes, they attacked the election. But Russia doesn’t care who wins our elections. What they want to do is pit Americans against one another… .’ McMaster writes that the “fragility” of Trump’s ego and “his deep sense of aggrievement” would never allow him to make this kind of distinction.
McMaster felt it was his “duty” to point out to Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin “was not and would never be Trump’s friend.” McMaster warned Trump that Putin is “the best liar in the world” and would try to “play” Trump to get what he wanted and manipulate him with “ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship.’”
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McMaster’s account of the Trump team is not pretty. Steve Bannon, Trump’s “chief strategist” early in the presidency, is portrayed as a “fawning court jester” who played “on Trump’s anxiety and sense of beleaguerment … with stories, mainly about who was out to get him and what he could do to ‘counterpunch.’”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis were often at odds with Trump, McMaster says. Tillerson, who had previously run Exxon, is portrayed as inaccessible to top officials in Trump’s administration, while Mattis is described as an obstructionist. McMaster writes that Tillerson and Mattis viewed Trump as “dangerous” and seemed to construe their roles as if “Trump was an emergency and that anyone abetting him was an adversary.” Trump himself also contributed to the dysfunction: “He enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration.”
Also, McMaster wasn’t on the same page as his boss on some key foreign policy issues. McMaster enumerates those issues as “allies, authoritarians, and Afghanistan.” Trump denigrated American allies whom he saw as “freeloaders”; he embraced authoritarian rulers who McMaster despised; and while Trump largely believed Afghanistan was a lost cause, McMaster thought there was a path forward for the country, and he pushed for a more significant US commitment there, while simultaneously blocking a cockamamie notion by Bannon to turn the conduct of the Afghan war over to American private military contractors.
The only news here is that, shockingly, Trump’s instincts on Afghanistan were considerably better than that of his National Security Advisor. Afghanistan was pretty clearly a lost cause as early as 2009. That McMaster still thought otherwise as late as 2017 is a triumph of hope over experience.
Otherwise, to paraphrase the late Denny Green, Trump is who we thought he was: a mercurial egomaniac who surrounded himself with sycophants.
McMaster does give Trump his due for some sound foreign policy decisions. Unlike President Barack Obama, who had dithered over his own “red line” when the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against civilians, Trump acted decisively when Assad used chemical weapons in early April 2017, killing dozens of civilians. Trump responded by ordering airstrikes against the Syrian airbase where the chemical weapons strike was launched from.
There were multiple retaliatory strikes against Syria for use of chemical weapons during Trump’s term, so I don’t know which one McMaster is referring to here. Famously, he used “the Mother of All Bombs” in one instance; oddly, I can find no posts in the archives about that. I wrote quite a long one about a joint US-UK-France strike in April 2018 noting that it seemed purely symbolic, with no strategic end. Time has proven that assessment correct.
And on the most important foreign policy issue, China, McMaster concluded that Trump made the right decisions. McMaster oversaw Trump’s 2017 national security strategy document, which took a tougher public stance on China than previous administrations, calling the Chinese out for stealing US intellectual property every year valued at “hundreds of billions of dollars” while noting that China “is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own.” Briefed by McMaster on the new national security strategy, Trump responded, “This is fantastic,” and asked for similar language in his upcoming speeches.
Nadia Schadlow, McMasters’ deputy, was the principal author of the Trump National Security Strategy, which was widely lauded. While it was, in many ways, a continuation of the “Pivot to Asia” begun under Hillary Clinton during the Obama Administration in 2011, Trump’s posture was certainly more aggressive. Then-candidate Joe Biden was critical of this during the 2020 campaign but has not only continued but doubled down on the policy. Time will tell how wise it all is.
The assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, seems to have marked a decisive break from Trump for McMaster, who, in a previous book published in 2020, “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World,” had avoided direct criticisms of his former commander in chief.
By contrast, in his new book, McMaster writes that in the aftermath of his 2020 electoral defeat, Trump’s “ego and love of self… drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation.” McMaster adds, “The attack on the US Capitol stained our image, and it will take a long-term effort to restore what Donald Trump, his enablers, and those they encouraged took from us that day.”
While all federal employees take this oath, military officers tend to focus on it as a hallmark of their profession. I’m shocked how many of them have managed to justify the insurrection in support of Trump.
Bergen concludes:
So, what might this all mean for a second Trump term, if there is one? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlines plans for Trump loyalists to replace numerous career foreign service officers and intelligence officials. Those loyalists would likely tell Trump precisely what he wants to hear rather than give the president their unvarnished assessments of the national security challenges facing the US, which is the proper role of American national security professionals.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but the fact that CNN found at least 140 people who worked for Trump are involved in the project speaks for itself. And in a second Trump term, there would likely be no McMasters to tell Trump what he doesn’t want to hear; in fact, that’s kind of the whole point of Project 2025, which would replace as many as 50,000 workers in the federal government with Trump loyalists.
I think that’s right. The thing Trump learned from his first term was that surrounding himself with retired general and flag officers and others with significant experience meant people who would try to stop him from doing things they thought bad for the country, if not downright nutty. There won’t be any of those in a second Trump term. Thankfully, one seems increasingly unlikely.
