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

accomplish anything anyway, right? If you really care about global warming, I mean, what the hell good is the Paris Accord going to really do? But he had a line in the speech, you know, I was elected by the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. And it was like just a gratuitous kick in the ass to Macron, you know? It's called the Paris Accord, you know? And he was trying to get Trump to stand.

I said, hey, you know, we could probably do without that line. And then, of course, you know, that the response is, oh, no, the base will love it, for example. Or if he was concerned about transgender people coming into the military, for example, and the degree to which that's a pre-existing condition, maybe, and so forth.

And I said, well, you should do a study of it and do it properly and make the decision. And then the others who said, no, your base wants you to just tweet something. Just tweet something right now. So President Trump is very disruptive. And there's a lot in Washington that needs to be disrupted. But part of the story is that he's so disruptive, he often disrupts his own agenda as a result.

And so I think what helps him, what can help him, are people around him who understand his agenda, who want to help him pursue his agenda, but who help him be a lot more effective. And again, kind of get to the politics of addition, right? One of the big themes in the book is at war with ourselves, like within the administration.

But hey, we're at war with ourselves across America, like in our polity, right? And everybody's at each other's throats. And the vitriolic nature of our discourse is not good for our psyche. And it's also not good for the strength of our nation, because I think it portrays weakness to our adversaries and enemies abroad.

So I guess the message would be, hey, let's get over it, work together, have meaningful, respectful discussions about what we want to achieve to build a better future.

Yeah.

Yeah, worked his way back into the president's good graces in time to get a presidential pardon before the end of Trump's first term.

After he was profoundly disloyal to him and disparaged Trump to anybody who would listen. Yeah.

I don't know. It's a national security picture. I think he's like an outside attack dog.

No, it really came from us being successful as part of the national security team on the National Security Council staff in presenting the president with best analysis and with multiple options. Because Bannon didn't want multiple options. He wanted his option. He wanted his foreign policy. And so he saw me as a danger to his agenda, right?

And so what they did is they came up with a number of narratives that then they advanced in social media and one of the biggest social media attacks against any individual in history up to that time in the summer of August 2017. And- Was Breitbart against you, basically? Yeah, well, they spark it, right? But a company that didn't want to be named in the book did a digital forensics audit.

The Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Laboratory did it at the time. But since then, another company that does AI-related analysis showed exactly how these messages spread. It's really fascinating. And they went to real people, like real influencers and real kind of pseudo media platforms like Breitbart and so forth. Some cable news personalities, for example, some bloggers in the blogosphere.

But then the message was spread. And the heat, it's like a heat sensor they show in this briefing, spread wildly because of Russian trolls and bots. Because the Russians kind of allied themselves with, I don't know what to call this group. I don't know what you call them, Michael. It's the alt-right. None of it's useful terms, right?

People have a broad range of views, and they're entitled to their views. I'm not disparaging them anyway. But this group of people essentially were allied with the Russians, at least tacitly. And that's how the whole thing spread, around three narratives. One was I was a globalist general. If it wouldn't put America first. The second was that I was anti-Israel, which was kind of ludicrous.

I mean, right in the book, Prime Minister Netanyahu called me up and said, what the hell's going on? That's ridiculous.

I don't think they're excited about giving aid to Israel. No, that's right, that's right. They're internally inconsistent, a lot of these views, by this kind of group of people. I don't know what to call them, the retrenchers, the neo-isolationists. I mean, none of these labels are particularly, are comprehensive, and there are a wide variety of views I mentioned are within this group.

Yeah, they're inconsistent in their views.

OK, so I think it's really important to understand where Donald Trump came from, from coming of age. And I read about this in the book. 1970s, right? Lost war in Vietnam and the evacuation from Saigon. You had the first president in history resign during this period of time. A period of stagflation, multiple energy crises in this period of time, as we're eulogizing

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