H.R. McMaster

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133 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard May 2025

H.R. McMaster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Honestly with Bari Weiss · H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly · 16 Jan 2025 podcast
So it was at war with ourselves. I mean, that's why that's the title of the book. But that's not unprecedented. I took the title from my conversation with Admiral Poindexter, who had been a national security advisor in the Reagan administration. He was talking about not his time as national security advisor, although he did have a bumpy road there with the rank contra and everything else.
But he was talking about the first year of the Reagan administration. He said, yeah, we were at war with ourselves. And what I came to understand across that year is I think a lot of that at war with yourselves and that difficult environment you described has to do with the way people define their roles, right? How they see their roles as they come into an administration.
And I think that there are people in any administration who want to help the elected president make the best decisions for the American people, right? I mean, that's what you would hope everybody wants to do. And in my role, that had to do with making sure the president gets best advice and gets multiple options to determine his own agenda and make those decisions.
Absolutely. And I think that's kind of the second group of people. They don't want to give the president options. They want to manipulate decisions based on their own agenda, not the president's agenda.
And then in Donald Trump's administration, a group that was probably overrepresented are people who define the president as an emergency who has to be contained or as a danger to the country or the world. And so the problem with that second and third group of people, hey, it's like nobody elected you. So not only are you not serving the president well. But these are people he's chosen.
They're people he's chosen.
Right. Yeah, absolutely. And the tactics they employed to do that, it was all kind of, it just made everything harder. And really, the story of the book is, at least for the 13 months I was there, we transcended it. We got things done anyway. But every element of that friction just kind of wore you down, ground you down a little bit. And the tactics they employed undercut you and so forth.
But the first Trump administration, I think you're alluding to this, what's going to be different in the second one, nobody was as surprised as Donald Trump when he won the election in 2016, right? And so there wasn't a whole lot of preparation in terms of who's going to come into a lot of these positions. And he didn't have any kind of trust build up with a lot of the people.
He didn't know the people. Now it's going to be I think, somewhat different in that he's had a lot more time to prepare deliberately for this. And he's selected his people. It was easy to kneecap me, the people down the hall, because I didn't have a history with him. Now it's going to be harder to do that with Michael Waltz, who's really his clear pick.
And he's known as a congressman, for example, or Marco Rubio. Although they will come under attack, though, because there are still going to be these different camps in the administration based on those different motivations. but also based on, I think, some of the worldviews within the administration that will not be compatible with one another.
Well, you know, President Trump obviously values loyalty like any president would. But also, you know, with President Trump, like any other president, right? He's the most powerful person in the world, you could argue, right? So people are going to try to ingratiate themselves to him and try to use him to advance their agenda. So, you know, people, they know how to push his buttons.
You know, I mentioned in the You know, the first meeting I went into the Oval Office, I describe it as an environment of competitive sycophancy. I mean, it was unbelievable. I mean, your instincts are always so good, Mr. President. You're so wise. I was like, oh my gosh, are these people serious? So I think- Does he fall for that? Yeah. Yeah, he does.
It's absolutely stunning.
No, but I think a lot of people do. And really, part of my motivation in writing this, not that the president's going to necessarily read it or anything, and there's a lot of positive about what he accomplished in here and so forth. But I want it to be a bit of a warning to him. The guy was in the real estate business. Of course, you've always had people try to manipulate him or so forth.
But he's particularly vulnerable to that kind of tactic. And the other tactic I mentioned is that the president really enjoys positive attention and praise and so forth, also from his loyal political base generally. So oftentimes, he would make, I think, a really tough, great decision, best decision he could make for the American people. And then people get in his ear about it. What do they say?
Hey, that's going to make you look weak to your base. That's going to alienate your base.
And so it's that kind of effort to influence him, which precludes Donald Trump, I think, from getting to the politics of addition, to bring more people into his movement, his tent, and results in some of the, maybe a couple of the nominations and things that he does, really to just double down on the affirmation from his base.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Used it all the time, you know. And, you know, there are anecdotes about it. I mean, what I'd said to the president is, hey, you know, the terrorists, they want to define this as a war of religion. But these are irreligious criminals who use a perverted interpretation of Islam to advance their criminal and political agendas. And he's like, I like that general. I like that general.
And I said, all you have to do is call it Islamist. And then, of course, that elicited the counterattack that really played out in Breitbart and all these pseudo media platforms that Bannon and others could influence. Another example was what he was going to pull out of the Paris Accord, which, you know, I mean, it was fine with me because the Paris Accord doesn't
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