So far, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster has been quiet about his time in the Trump White House. McMaster served with distinction in major American conflicts of the past few decades — the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War — but as McMaster recounts in his new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” his most challenging tour as a soldier was in some ways his last: as national security adviser to a notoriously volatile president.
In his damning, insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive flattery” with Trump’s advisers flattering the president by saying things 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 entire North Korean army during one of their parades?”
McMaster's book, which focuses on Trump's tenure as commander in chief, comes at a particularly opportune time, just as many Americans are beginning to seriously question whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would make a better commander in chief.
In her presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Harris devoted part of her speech to showcasing her national security credentials. For example, she addressed the war in Gaza and said that as president, she would remain steadfast in her commitment to the U.S. alliance with Israel to “ensure that Israel can defend itself.” Harris also said that Palestinians have “their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.” With this speech, Harris sought to thread a sensitive needle between Americans who vehemently oppose the war — many of them in her own party — and those who wholeheartedly support Israel.
McMaster offers unique detail about Trump's approach to foreign policy and — like his successor as national security adviser, former ambassador to the United Nations 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 of a second Trump term.
In addition to being a highly decorated officer, McMaster also holds a doctorate in history. His first book, “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam,” told the somber 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 about how the conflict was going and the full range of policy options available to their commander in chief.
'Tell Trump what he doesn't want to hear'
McMaster wouldn’t make the same mistake after Trump appointed him as his national security adviser in February 2017. He writes, “I knew that in order to do my duty, I had to tell Trump what he didn’t want to hear.” This explains why McMaster lasted only a year. (Disclosure: I’ve known McMaster professionally since 2010, when he led an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan.)
One topic was particularly nerve-wracking for Trump: Russia. McMaster astutely observes, “I wish Trump could separate the issue of Russian election interference from the legitimacy of his presidency. He could have said, 'Yes, they attacked the election. But Russia doesn't care who wins our election. What they want to do is pit Americans against each other. . . '” McMaster writes that Trump's “fragility” ego and “his deep sense of discontent” would never allow him to make that kind of distinction.
McMaster felt it was his “duty” to point out to Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin “was not a friend of Trump and never would be.” McMaster warned Trump that Putin was “the world’s best liar” and that he would try to “play” Trump to get what he wanted and manipulate him with “duplicitous promises of a ‘better relationship.’”
The straw that ended McMaster's tenure in the White House appeared to come when he said publicly on February 17, 2018 at the Munich Security Forum, the annual gathering of top Western foreign policy officials, that the indictment of a group of Russian intelligence officers for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election was “irreversible” evidence of Russian interference in that election.
Trump soon tweeted, “General McMaster failed to mention that the results of the 2016 election were not influenced or changed by the Russians…” When the commander in chief began publicly criticizing him on Twitter, it was clear that McMaster would not be in the White House much longer.
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 fears and sense of siege … with stories, mostly about who was out to get him and what he could do to ‘strike back.’”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis were often at odds with Trump, McMaster says. Tillerson, who previously led Exxon, is portrayed as unreachable by top officials in Trump's administration, while Mattis is described as an obstructionist. McMaster writes that Tillerson and Mattis saw Trump as “dangerous” and seemed to view their roles as if “Trump was an emergency and anyone who helped him was an adversary.” Trump himself also contributed to the dysfunction: “He reveled in and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and throughout the administration.”
Moreover, McMaster was not in sync with his boss on a number of key foreign policy issues. McMaster lists those issues as “allies, authoritarians, and Afghanistan.” Trump denigrated American allies he saw as “profiteers”; he embraced authoritarian rulers 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 more significant American involvement there while simultaneously blocking Bannon’s lunatic notion that the Afghan war should be turned over to private American military contractors.
McMaster gives Trump credit for Syria and China
McMaster does give Trump his due for his good foreign policy decisions. Unlike President Barack Obama, who wavered on 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 on the Syrian air base where the chemical weapons were fired.
And on the key foreign policy issue, China, McMaster concluded that Trump had made the right decisions. McMaster oversaw Trump’s 2017 national security strategy document, which took a tougher public stance on China than previous administrations, berating the Chinese for stealing “hundreds of billions of dollars” worth of American intellectual property every year while noting that China is building “the most capable and best-funded military in the world, second only to 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 Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol appears to have marked a decisive break with Trump for McMaster, who had avoided direct criticism of his former commander in chief in an earlier 2020 book, “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World.”
In contrast, McMaster writes in his new book that Trump's “ego and self-love led him to abandon his oath to 'support and defend the Constitution,' the highest duty of a president, after his 2020 election defeat.” McMaster adds: “The attack on the United States Capitol has tarnished our image, and it will take a long, drawn-out effort to restore what Donald Trump, his cronies, and those they encouraged took from us that day.”
So what might all this mean for a second Trump term, if it comes? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlines plans for Trump loyalists to replace scores of career foreign service and intelligence officers. Those loyalists would likely tell Trump exactly what he wants to hear, rather than offering the president their unvarnished assessments of the national security challenges facing the U.S., which is the proper role of American national security professionals.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but the fact that CNN has found at least 140 people who worked for Trump involved in the project speaks for itself. And in a second Trump term, there likely wouldn’t be any McMasters to tell Trump what he doesn’t want to hear; that’s kind of the point of Project 2025, which would replace as many as 50,000 federal employees with Trump loyalists.
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