H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
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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.
And it was a guy from the Nation magazine. famously right-wing magazine. And they loved it. And the thing about it, which I agreed with me, it's brilliantly written. And that's something that you don't often get from a member of the military or somebody who's been in the administration is usually some laborious prose. That is not the case. Read the book. It's fantastic. So HR, I just wanted to start out, because of what is going on in DC, we're about to face another Trump administration in how many days now? I don't even...
14 days, 15 days.
Talk to me a little bit about what it is like in that environment. You were there the first year in the first administration and you read your book and you're like, good Lord, this is a nest of vipers. Everyone's trying to backstab and push people out, et cetera. How would you describe just that year in a sort of broad sense of going from the military into the White House and being in a position where there's a lot of newbies there and people don't really know what they're doing. What was that like?
Hey, Michael, what a blast to be here with you and to be in my hometown of Philadelphia and everything. I just want to say at the outset, go Eagles, go Eagles. And I love the free press. I mean, I think all of you are fans here too, right? I mean, it's just so fantastic. And what a privilege. So thanks to everybody. And thanks to everybody who came out tonight in the cold.
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