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

President Carter, really the Carter presidency, right? And he ran hostage. And he came out of that with a real sense of aggrievement that America's been aggrieved, that America's been taken advantage of. And so he wants to, first of all, advance American interest. I mean, America first, it's really what he wants to do, not in the 1930s Lindbergh sense, but like in a Reagan act.

Reagan, make America great again. Make America great with Reagan. It's, I think, consciously borrowed from that period of time. And so he is well motivated in that connection. There's nothing nefarious about that. But he does, as a result, have this deep skepticism about sustained commitments abroad.

And he tends to see retrenchment or disengagement from those complex problem sets as an unmitigated good. But at the same time, he understands peace through strength. At the same time, he understands that it's a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one. He wants others to share the burden, but he's deeply skeptical of the alliances that allow burden sharing.

So he has a great deal of consistency in a lot of areas, right? border security, deregulation, trade issues, encountering Chinese economic aggression, for example, invigorating our industrial base. He's dead consistent on that stuff. But there are these other issue areas where he carries these opposing views with him.

And it's going to be the people around him who help him reconcile that kind of dissonance that he carries.

That was a fun game I used to play with my wife, Katie, in the morning. Guess what the president tweeted last night as I was on the way out the door?

I like it. I mean, I really do.

Not strong enough, I think. So he's unconventional. Trump is really unconventional, obviously. He'll say things that are arresting. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I was like, wow, dude. did he really say that? But oftentimes, I recount some of these discussions in the book, some of the world leaders, it's really effective with them. He's not insulting with them.

Actually, when he's one-on-one with a world leader, he's a really good host. He's kind of in the hospitality business. He's a very gracious host. He's not mean to anybody in person, right? He might tweet something mean about Justin Trudeau, you know what I mean? But he's not But he's going to be, you know, and he might say something like about the 51st state. I mean, gosh, oh, geez.

So, but I'm not saying everything he says is productive. But in a lot of cases, because there's like really no filter, like there's no artifice with Donald Trump, right? What you see is what you get. That's unusual for a politician. And I think at times it can be effective for him.

And then I think also in these sorts of tweets, I think that's what we should do is unleash hell on not only Hamas, but their Iranian sponsors. If there are hostages, The Israeli hostages and American hostages, damn it, aren't released. I, for one, and there hasn't been much discussion of this, really.

I am disappointed that we have our military has not been actively engaged in getting our hostages back alongside of the Israeli military. Now, there are practical difficulties associated with that. The Israelis are pretty competent on their own. You know, what really can we do? We could do more.

With the Houthis, for example, you know, the Houthis who are an agent of the Iranians at this stage, disrupting, shipping the Bab al-Mandeb. I think you could make relatively short work of the Houthis. And so there are ways for him to make good on this, you know, to make good on this kind of rhetoric. He would also say other things. I tell a story in the book, too, about...

You know, Pakistan, right? I mean, we had serial gullibility with Pakistan, right? And we believe for so many time and time again, you know, if we just give them more aid, you know, they'll behave differently and stop support for terrorist organizations. And, you know, and then finally Trump just tweeted, hey, we're to stop, we're to cut everything off to the Pakistanis.

Well, he had told our government to do that, but they were, people were dragging their feet. So a lot of the tweets, you know, a lot of them were effective. Some were counterproductive.

many of them were just amusing you know like like remember the one i would never call kim jong-un short and fat remember that one yeah yeah i mean i was i was i was in quality i was in hanoi at the time riding the back of the of uh one of the armored cars in the in the convoy with them with matt pottinger who's fantastic um and we were just crying laughing about it and so how did like how

And then you have this- That was in the UN speech. I tried to get them to take that out of the speech. There's stories in there too. You asked them to take it out. It was pretty funny, yeah, pretty funny.

No, it was a cover story. It was a story, a big headline story. I don't know if it was on page one. It was not on page one. Yeah, he was signing it.

That's right, yeah.

He gave it to me to send to Vladimir Putin.

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