It’s not exactly a secret that many officials who worked closely with Donald Trump during his presidency are not on board with his bid for a second term. Not only is Trump’s former vice president withholding his support for the Republican’s 2024 candidacy, and not only is Trump’s former White House chief of staff condemning his former boss, but Trump’s former White House press secretary and communications director appeared at the Democratic convention last week and explained how and why the GOP nominee lies.
Retired Army Gen. H.R. McMaster offers another special case.
McMaster became the White House national security adviser in early 2017, shortly after Michael Flynn was fired after two weeks on the job. In the 14 months that followed, the retired general got a first-hand look at how Trump operated, and as he writes in his new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” McMaster wasn’t altogether impressed.
Based on the latest reporting, the “blistering” book describes Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy,” complains of Trump’s “outlandish“ national security ideas, and alerts readers to the fact that the GOP nominee was a president who was “addicted to adulation” and easily manipulated by flattery.
But perhaps most notable of all is the book’s description of McMaster’s concerns about Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The Wall Street Journal published a striking excerpt, which began “From the beginning of my time as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, in February 2017, I found that discussions of Vladimir Putin and Russia were difficult to have with the president.”
[O]ur relationship reached a breaking point after I attended the Munich Security Conference in February 2018. … [W]hat made news was the response I gave to a question from a member of the Russian Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly, who suggested cooperation between Moscow and Washington in the area of cybersecurity. After joking that I doubted there would be any Russian cyber experts available because they were all engaged in subverting our democracies, I described evidence cited in the Mueller investigation’s indictments of Russians for election interference in 2016 as “incontrovertible.”
Trump, McMaster quickly learned, was “furious” that his national security adviser had told the truth in public, and his “aversion” to McMaster soon intensified — in part because the retired general “was the principal voice telling him that Putin was using him.”
The excerpt went on to note a nerve-agent attack in England that targeted former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, which was easily traced to Moscow.
Just a few days after the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, a story appeared in the New York Post with the headline “Putin Heaps Praise on Trump, Pans U.S. Politics.” When I walked into the Oval Office that evening, on another matter, the president had a copy of the article and was writing a note to the Russian leader across the page with a fat black Sharpie. He asked me to get the clipping to Putin.
McMaster ignored the directive, and confided to his wife, “After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.”
This was not an unfamiliar sentiment. As I noted in my new book, retired Republican Sen. Dan Coats, who served for more than two years as Trump’s director of national intelligence, has said he believes Putin’s government had something on Trump, which left him compromised.
The former president was so acquiescent toward Russia that, in 2018, former CIA director John Brennan also suggested that the Kremlin “may have something on” Trump personally. Brennan added, “The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump, and may have things that they could expose.”
It’s not just Democrats, in other words, who’ve expressed concern about Trump, Putin and Russia. Members of the Republican’s own team felt the same way.
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