Very few people have worked closely with Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him.
But Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Trump, is an exception.
In his book At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he gives an honest account of working in Trump’s first administration: the good, the bad, and the unexpected.
Last week, McMaster, 62, sat down with Michael Moynihan at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for a live Free Press Book Club event to discuss it all. They talk about his moments of tension with Trump, his understanding of Trump’s foreign policy, and how Trump’s rhetoric toward adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press.
They also get into Trump’s current cabinet picks—ones who McMaster sees as good, like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, but how good picks do not ensure a harmonious administration. They discuss Trump’s options for handling Russia, Iran, and Hamas in his second term, and why McMaster is surprisingly and cautiously optimistic about Trump 2.0. —BW
Dynamics within the first Trump White House:
Michael Moynihan: It’s very clear in your book that you see your job as somebody who has to implement the president’s agenda. But it’s also clear that you see people around you who have their own agenda that they’re trying to foist upon the president.
H.R. McMaster: Absolutely. The first group are people who don’t want to give the president options. They want to manipulate decisions based on their own agenda, not the president’s agenda. Then there were the people in Donald Trump’s administration who defined the president as an emergency or a danger to the country or the world, who had to be contained. And so the problem with those groups of people is that nobody elected them.
MM: There are a couple of people in the book that say, We’re afraid that Donald Trump is dangerous, right?
HRM: Absolutely. It just made everything harder. But at least for my 30 months, we transcended it. We got things done anyway. But every element of that friction just wore us down a little bit—and the other tactics they employed undercut us.
Nobody was as surprised as Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election. So there wasn’t a whole lot of preparation in terms of who’s going to come into many of these positions. He didn’t have any kind of trust built up with a lot of the people. Now it’s going to be somewhat different. He’s had a lot more time to prepare deliberately for this, and he’s selected his people. It was easy to kneecap me, because I didn’t have a history with him. Now it’s going to be harder to do that with Michael Waltz and Marco Rubio. Although they will come under attack because there are still going to be different camps in the new administration based on different motivations.
The president is the most powerful person in the world, so people are going to try to ingratiate themselves to him and try to use him to advance their agenda. People know how to push his buttons. I’ve described my first meeting in the Oval Office as an environment of competitive sycophancy. It was unbelievable. Things were said like, “Your instincts are always so good, Mr. President” and “You’re so wise.” I was like, “My gosh, are these people serious?”
MM: Does he fall for that?
HRM: Yes, he does. But I think a lot of people do. And it’s really part of my motivation for writing this book; I wanted it to be a bit of a warning to him. Of course, he’s always had people try to manipulate him. But he’s particularly vulnerable to that tactic. The other tactic is that the president really enjoys positive attention from his political base. So oftentimes he would want to make a really tough, but great decision for the American people, but then people would get in his ear, saying things like, “Hey, that’s going to make you look weak to your base.” “That’s going to alienate your base.” And it’s that kind of effort to influence him which precludes Donald Trump from getting to the politics of addition. It precludes him from bringing more people into his movement.
Steve Bannon, and the disinformation campaign that targeted McMaster:
MM: I want to talk about a name that is in your book, probably more than any other, which is “Steve Bannon.” The title of your book is At War with Ourselves, and one of the combatants is Steve Bannon.
HRM: Steve Bannon worked his way back into the president’s good graces in time to get a presidential pardon before the end of Trump’s first term. After he was profoundly disloyal to him and disparaged Trump to anybody who would listen in.
MM: What do you attribute that hostility to? Is it personal disagreements, different styles, ideological differences? Is it Bannon’s shifting views on foreign policy?
HRM: No, it came from us—the national security team on the National Security Council—being successful in presenting the president with the best analysis and with multiple options. Bannon didn’t want multiple options. He wanted his option. He wanted his foreign policy. He saw me as a danger to his agenda. So they came up with a number of narratives that they advanced on social media. And it was one of the biggest social media attacks against any individual in history up to that time, August 2017.
MM: Against you, basically.
HRM: Well, they sparked it. A company that does AI-related analysis showed exactly how these messages spread, how they went to real people—real influencers—to pseudo-media platforms like Breitbart to cable news personalities and to bloggers. Then the message spread wildly because of Russian trolls and bots. The Russians allied themselves with this group. I don’t know what you call this group—“the alt-right,” maybe.
None of these terms are useful, because people have a broad range of views and they’re entitled to their views—I’m not disparaging in any way. But this group of people essentially was allied with the Russians, at least tacitly. And that’s how the whole thing spread around a few narratives. One narrative was that I was a globalist general that wouldn’t put America first. The second narrative was that I was anti-Israel, which was ludicrous. Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu called me up and said, “What the hell’s going on?”
The hostages in Gaza:
MM: Donald Trump recently said all “hell will break out” if the hostages aren’t returned by the time he becomes president. And, he has also said, October 7 would have never happened if he were president. How does that fall on your ears when you’re in the Oval Office?
HRM: I like that. I really do. Trump is really unconventional. Obviously, he’ll say things that are arresting. I can’t say how many times it’s like, “Wow, did he really say that?” But oftentimes it’s really effective with world leaders. Like, he’s not insulting them. But in a lot of cases, because there’s no filter, what you see is what you get. That’s unusual for a politician. And it can be effective.
With regard to his tweets, I think that’s what we should do, unleash hell on Hamas and their Iranian sponsors for our hostages. Israeli hostages and American hostages aren’t released. And I am disappointed that our military has not been actively engaged in getting our hostages back alongside the Israeli military.
McMaster’s advice to Trump on Russia:
MM: Let’s talk about Russia. Obviously, the attacks on Trump as a Russian agent were ridiculous and unfounded. But you’ve also said that we’ve allowed Russia to get away with a lot. And it’s probably going to be worse next time around. You recount in the book [former national security adviser] Keith Kellogg saying things like, “I’m going to solve all of this, just give me a couple of days, and I can take care of this.” When Trump’s team says something like that, is there any part of you that says they could get the ball rolling?
HRM: Well, in this case, no. The reason is that any president will imagine himself as a mirror image of whoever his interlocutor is and think, He'll prioritize the same things that I would prioritize. But look, Putin is a man who’s obsessed with restoring Russia to national greatness by reestablishing the Russian Empire.
I think he’s operating against history. I can’t think of one example in history in which a side was able to achieve a favorable outcome from a negotiated settlement that did not reflect the military realities on the ground. You can’t get a big deal with Putin without first convincing him that he’s losing. I think President Trump will belatedly come to that conclusion. He’ll recognize that there cannot be an end to the war until Putin is convinced that he's losing because Putin won’t stop.
Look at what he’s doing right now. He’s already annexed Belarus. He’s continuing the onslaught against Ukraine, even though 30,000 casualties a month is unsustainable for the Russians. He flipped an election in Romania. He’s meddling in other European elections. He’s cutting undersea cables. He’s burning warehouses in Lithuania and putting incendiary bombs on DHL aircraft.
Russia’s waging a war against us right now, but Russia’s very weak. Putin is sitting on piles of cash that he can’t convert, he has a severe labor shortage, and the country is on the verge of hyperinflation. So instead of saying, “I’m going to solve it in a day”—this feckless approach to supporting the Ukrainians—Trump should say, “I’m going to issue long-term, low-interest loans to the Ukrainians to buy as many U.S. weapons and ammunitions as they want.”
The strain is on both sides. The Ukrainians also have a significant manpower shortage to sustain their defensive capabilities. But Russia’s ambitions are much larger than their military capabilities, even as they’re employing 12,000 North Korean troops. It’s not a sign of strength. And that North Korean force is already decimated. The dynamic has to change.
Right now, there’s not a lot of movement on the front, but that could change. Every military has a breaking point. Every person has a breaking point. Battles and combat are aimed at the disintegration of human groups. And when I look at the losses that the Russians are taking, I don’t think it’s sustainable.
This episode is sponsored by the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is chaired by McMaster.
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