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From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Very few people have worked closely with Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him. But former National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, is an exception.
In his book, At War With Ourselves, My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he gives an honest account of working in Trump's first administration — the good, the bad, and the very unexpected. Last week, General McMaster sat down with my colleague Michael Moynihan at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for a live free press book club event to discuss it all.
They talk about his tensions with Trump, his understanding of Trump's worldview, particularly his foreign policy, and how Trump's rhetoric towards adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press. And how, as General McMaster puts it, Trump can be so disruptive, he often interrupts his own agenda. They talk about what to expect a few days from now when Trump takes office.
Trump's current cabinet picks, the ones who HR sees as good and the ones who sees as less good. They talk about Trump's options for handling Russia, China, and Iran, and why HR is cautiously and surprisingly optimistic about Trump 2.0.
Thank you.
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All right. Let's do this. Do that. All right. Hi, everybody. Thank you guys all for coming. This is going to be slightly difficult for me because rarely do I have the occasion when I'm with someone interesting and important. It's happened before. And I think that I can't contain it for 45 or 55 minutes. I need to do like three hours. I do like a Rogan length. And that's kind of what's in my head.
So you're going to allow me to sort through some of the stuff that I want to to talk to HR about. The book, by the way, is fantastic. And I do a thing that I never do. I never read reviews of books until I'm done reading them. On the train up here, I read the one from the New York Times. And I said, they're gonna absolutely slam him. They're gonna hate him.
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