(CNN) — Until now, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster has been tight-lipped about his time in Donald Trump’s White House. McMaster served with distinction in key American conflicts of the past few decades: the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. But as McMaster recounts in his new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” in some ways his most challenging service as a soldier was his last: serving as national security adviser to a notoriously mercurial president.
In his compelling and insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes the Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive flattery” during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying things like, “Your instincts are always right” or “No one has ever been treated this badly by the press.” Meanwhile, Trump would say “outlandish” things like, “Why don’t we bomb the drugs?” in Mexico or “Why don’t we just wipe out the entire North Korean military during one of their parades?”
McMaster’s book, which focuses on Trump’s tenure as commander in chief, comes at an especially opportune time, just as many Americans are beginning to seriously consider whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would be a better commander in chief.
With conventions over, Harris and Trump begin the final stretch toward Election Day
In her acceptance speech for the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Harris devoted part of her speech to trying to demonstrate her national security credentials. She spoke, for example, of the war in Gaza, saying that as president she would stand firm on the US alliance with Israel to “ensure that Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said that Palestinians have “a right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.” With this speech, Harris was trying to thread a delicate needle between Americans who strongly oppose the war — many of them in her own party — and those who wholeheartedly back Israel.
McMaster offers unique insights into Trump’s approach to foreign policy, and — like his successor as national security adviser, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, who wrote scathingly about the former president in a 2020 book — his account is likely to do little to reassure U.S. allies about the prospects for a second Trump term.
In addition to being a highly decorated officer, McMaster also holds a Ph.D. in history. His first book, “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam,” told the sad story of how America’s top 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 on how the conflict was going and the full range of policy options open to their commander in chief.
Then-national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster at the White House in 2017. (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
“Telling Trump what he didn’t want to hear”
McMaster wasn’t about to make the same mistake after Trump picked him to be his national security adviser in February 2017. He writes, “I knew that to do 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. (A side note: I’ve known McMaster professionally since 2010, when he was running an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan.)
One issue was particularly tense for Trump: Russia. McMaster astutely observes: “I wish Trump could separate the question 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 election. They just want to pit Americans against each other…’” McMaster writes that Trump’s “fragility” of ego and “deep sense of grievance” 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 world’s greatest liar” and would try to “play” Trump to get what he wanted and manipulate him with “ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship.’”
The final straw that ended McMaster’s tenure at the White House appears to have been when he publicly told the Munich Security Forum — the annual gathering of senior Western foreign policy officials — on February 17, 2018, that the indictment of a group of Russian intelligence officers for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election was “inconvertible” proof of Russian meddling in that election.
Trump was quick to tweet: “General McMaster forgot to say that the 2016 election results were not affected or changed by the Russians…” Once the commander in chief began publicly chastising him on Twitter, it was obvious that McMaster would not be in the White House for long.
McMaster’s account of the Trump team is not pretty. Steve Bannon, Trump’s “chief strategist” early in the presidency, is portrayed as a “sycophantic court jester” who played “on Trump’s anxiety and sense of bewilderment … with stories, mostly about who was after him and what he could do to ‘fight back.’”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis were often at odds with Trump, McMaster says. Tillerson, who previously ran Exxon, is portrayed as inaccessible to senior Trump administration officials, while Mattis is described as an obstructionist. McMaster writes that Tillerson and Mattis viewed Trump as “dangerous” and seemed to interpret their roles as if “Trump were an emergency and anyone who supported him was an adversary.” Trump himself also contributed to the dysfunction: “He reveled in and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration.”
Moreover, McMaster was not on the same page as his boss on some key foreign policy issues. McMaster lists those issues as “allies, authoritarians, and Afghanistan.” Trump denigrated American allies he saw as “freeloaders”; he embraced authoritarian rulers McMaster despised; and while Trump largely believed Afghanistan was a lost cause, McMaster thought there was a way forward for the country, and he pushed for more significant U.S. engagement there while blocking a harebrained idea by Bannon to hand over the conduct of the Afghan war to American private military contractors.
McMaster gives Trump credit for Syria and China
McMaster credits Trump with some good foreign policy decisions. Unlike President Barack Obama, who wavered over his own “red line” when 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 from which the chemical weapons attack was launched.
And on the most important foreign policy issue, China, McMaster concluded that Trump made the right choices. McMaster oversaw Trump’s 2017 national security strategy document, which took a tougher public stance on China than previous administrations, calling out the Chinese for stealing American intellectual property each year worth “hundreds of billions of dollars,” while noting that China “is building the most capable and best-funded military in the world, after our own.” Briefed by McMaster on the new national security strategy, Trump responded, “This is fantastic,” and called for similar language in his upcoming speeches.
The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, appears to have marked a decisive break with Trump for McMaster, who, in an earlier book published in 2020, “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World,” had avoided direct criticism of his former commander in chief.
By contrast, in his new book, McMaster writes that following his 2020 election loss, Trump’s “ego and self-love…led him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ the highest obligation of a president.” McMaster adds: “The attack on the U.S. Capitol tarnished 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.”
So what might all this 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 and intelligence officials. Those loyalists are likely to tell Trump precisely what he wants to hear, rather than giving the president their unvarnished assessments of the national security challenges facing the United States, which is the proper role of American national security professionals.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but the fact that CNN uncovered that at least 140 people who worked for Trump are involved in the project speaks volumes. And in a second Trump term, there probably won’t be any McMasters to tell Trump what he doesn’t want to hear — in fact, that’s more or less the goal of Project 2025, which would replace up to 50,000 federal government workers with Trump loyalists.
