HR McMaster, Donald Trump’s second national security adviser, succeeded another US army general, Mike Flynn, in February 2017. In October, McMaster wrote a resignation letter but kept it in his desk.
Five months later, “completely fed-up”, he turned to John Kelly, a marine corps general and Trump’s second chief of staff. “Give me a fucking date,” said McMaster. Hours later, Trump called and put him out of his misery. McMaster had lasted 457 days – in his own words, in reference to a notoriously short-serving communications director, “41.3 Scaramuccis”.
At War With Ourselves is McMaster’s second look at the 14 months he spent in the White House. In Battlegrounds, published in the run-up to the 2020 election, he positioned himself as a historian and thinker, a West Point alum with a University of North Carolina PhD. He chose not to vent spleen. Not any more. January 6 left its mark.
“It will take a long-term effort to restore what Donald Trump, his enablers, and those who encouraged him took from us that day,” he writes of the day Trump sent his supporters to attack the US Capitol.
Once again, McMaster delivers food for thought. In a disturbing but intriguing read, he portrays his former boss as unfit for office.
“He proved unable to channel his emotions toward constructive purposes,” McMaster writes, adding: “Trump’s sense of aggrievement reinforced his penchant for seeking affirmation from his most loyal supporters rather than broadening his base of support.”
Even now, Trump feeds off of his personalized menu of gripes, his doxology: “I am your justice … I am your retribution”.
“Trump lacked basic knowledge of how the government runs,” McMaster writes, outlining a simple truth that produces outlandish expression.
“Sometimes his impulses were good,” McMaster adds. “Other times, to use one of his turns of phrase, ‘not so much’.”
Consider the effects of such shortcomings. In a December 2022 social media post, Trump demanded that the 2020 election be overturned, writing: “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution.”
Uh-huh.
Equally infamously, in December 2023, Trump openly mused about becoming a dictator “on day one”, if re-elected.
Oh no.
Trump also expects adoration from his staff and yearns to be flattered by America’s enemies.
“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand [Vladimir] Putin’s hold on Trump,” McMaster recalls telling his wife, Katie, after Russian agents poisoned Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, and his daughter, in the UK in 2018 – an episode that resulted in the death of a British woman.
Like George W Bush and Barack Obama, Trump hoped for a reset with Russia that never arrived. Unlike his predecessors, he insatiably craved Putin’s adulation. After the Skripal attack, Trump became mesmerized by a New York Post article. Its headline blared: Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics. Trump took out his Sharpie, jotted a note on the article and asked McMaster “to get the clipping to Putin”.
McMaster took the note home, then handed it to the White House staff secretary’s office. It went no further. Days later, Trump tweeted congratulations to Putin and castigated Bush and Obama, adding that Bush lacked “smarts”, and Obama was low on “energy” and “chemistry”.
McMaster’s book is not simply a takedown of Trump. McMaster is unsparing in his criticism of Obama and Joe Biden. He blasts Obama for the Iran nuclear deal and tags Biden for easing sanctions on Tehran and Venezuela, as well as for relaxing “security on the Mexican border”.
“I was sympathetic to the statement that candidate Trump had made many times in 2016 when he described the [Iran deal] as the ‘worst deal ever’,” McMaster recalls. “The deal gave the regime a cash payment of approximately $1.7bn up front and a subsequent payout of $100bn in unfrozen assets.”
That kind of money buys lots of mischief – or worse. Look at October 7, Hamas and Hezbollah.
McMaster also hammers Biden over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, labeling it his “most humiliating foreign policy failure”. A suicide bombing at the Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians dead. It haunts still. This week, Trump and his campaign highlighted the third anniversary of the tragedy. According to McMaster, though, Trump bears some of the blame. He negotiated with the Taliban and agreed to the release of 5,000 fighters.
McMaster also trains his sights on Trump’s enablers. Steve Bannon, once Trump’s chief White House strategist, now serving a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, receives particularly harsh treatment. As McMaster saw it, Bannon and his minions inside the White House “were there to advance their own agenda, at all costs, even if it meant undermining the constitution we were all sworn to ‘support and defend’.”
“As with Lady Macbeth”, Bannon’s “sociopathy was a kind of political suicide”. To McMaster, Bannon is a “malicious, untrustworthy grifter”.
Bannon should be out of prison in late October, in time for the election. On 9 December he is set to stand trial in New York state, on felony fraud charges.
McMaster takes segments of the American right to task for demanding his dismissal. He chivvies Alex Jones, the bankrupt conspiracy theorist, for hosting a Putin toady. The general also calls out Breitbart, the Daily Caller and Fox News luminaries Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. McMaster heaps blame on the Kremlin, too.
He ends wistfully. Several months after he left the White House, Trump phoned him.
“I miss you, General,” Trump said. “You did a great job for me and the country.”
McMaster says he offered a seemingly gracious yet empty reply. The two men “both knew” they “would never work together again”.
At War with Ourselves is published in the US by HarperCollins
