Michael Moynihan

speaker

842 appearances 21 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard May 2025

Michael Moynihan’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

Yeah. I mean, people try to put their own views on Donald Trump. I mean, this happens to a lot of people. I just wrote a piece for the Free Press on Bob Dylan. And you can find anyone saying, he's right wing, he's left wing, he's a Marxist, he's a Zionist. And it's like, he's just a musician. Relax. But the thing about it is, people do the same thing with Donald Trump all the time. He's one of us.

He's like Ron Paul in foreign policy. He's a neo-isolationist. What is the impression that you got from him ideologically when it came to foreign policy issues and the stuff that you were engaged in?

I want to ask you about something he said, because I'd be interested to see what you would do in a situation like this.

Mrs. Donald Trump today at Mar-a-Lago said this about the hostages in Gaza. It would not be good for Hamas, and it would not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out, and this is if the hostages aren't returned by the time he becomes president. I don't have to say any more, but that's what it is. And then he says that October 7th would have never happened if he were president.

That's the kind of stuff that you expect. I mean, you've heard this about Ukraine too, the invasion would have never happened. That kind of rhetoric, the kind of bellicose rhetoric, it'll be the worst thing that you've ever experienced if you don't do what I want. How does that fall on your ears when you're in the Oval Office with them? I kind of like that.

I totally like it, by the way. I'm sorry, but you're right. Yeah, I mean, and so people would get out.

Now, I have a list of my favorite Donald Trump tweets that I randomly send to friends that just amuse me to no end. But how does that work in, let's take North Korea, for instance. You have, on one level, you have these little rocket man tweets.

And then you have the kind of sycophancy in certain ways because it's kind of easy to flatter the guy and he likes being flattered. I mean, there's a story in the book where This is the most amazing thing to me. I couldn't believe that in the coverage of the book, and I'm going to pick this up, was it a cover of the New York Post that he was signing?

But he clipped it, and he was going to send it to Vladimir Putin.

And you intercepted it and stopped that from happening.

So you're like the mailman, Putin's mailman.

And killed a woman who picked up the bottle.

How does that manifest itself? He starts yelling at you in an aggressive way?

Just to go back to this question of what he believes, I mean, you know, you leave this job and you talk about it in a very funny way that John Bolton is like looking in the window like, hey, can I do this now? And he was auditioning for the job previously, right?

But the reason I bring Bolton up is that this has always mystified me, and tell me if I'm completely off base here, but I've always presumed that he hired him because he was on Fox News a lot. And he was talking about foreign policy on Fox News. And that's the foreign policy guy that I see on TV because he's a neoconservative in almost every way.

And people absolutely lost their minds in Bannon world and said, make sure that this guy doesn't get close to anything. And, you know, it's never going to be a second time around with him. But if he's the isolationist guy and he picks, you know, John Bolton as national security advisor, that never made sense to me. Why do you think he did that?

I mean, there's a point where he asked the opinion of his bodyguard, Keith, who had some role too, which I was surprised by. It was some foreign policy issues asking his bodyguard.

Russia. Obviously, the attacks on Trump as a Russian agent were ridiculous and unfounded. And, you know, he's obviously coming back into office with a justifiable chip on his shoulder about a number of the people that went after him. You said in your previous book quite presciently that we've allowed Russia to get away with a lot, and it's probably gonna be worse next time around.

And it's in the first chapter of the book. And by the way, there's a quote from Saul Bellow at the beginning of that book, which is like surprising. Only military book I've read with a Saul Bellow quote at the beginning.

But when you see what happened, and Donald Trump says, and the man with the Ukraine plan, Kellogg, who is obviously an antagonist in this book too, he says, I'm gonna solve all this. Just give me a couple of days. and I can take care of this. When he says something like that, I mean, you know the bluster of Donald Trump.

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