Donald Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster on Monday said he would not work for the former president again.
The retired lieutenant general, who worked in the Trump administration for 13 months beginning in February 2017, appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 to promote his new book, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. Trump’s spokesperson has already trashed the book as “nothing more than fake news” over its eyebrow-raising claims, with McMaster writing that Russian President Vladimir Putin manipulated Trump by playing to his “ego and insecurities with flattery.”
CNN host Anderson Cooper asked McMaster if he believed John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, who claimed Trump called American soldiers who were wounded and killed “suckers” and “losers” (Trump denies making the remarks.)
ADVERTISEMENT
McMaster said the comments “sounded out of character” to him and he “never heard the president say anything like that, that bad,” but “of course” heard Trump’s criticisms of his “dear friend,” the late Sen. John McCain. Trump said in 2015 McCain was a “war hero ‘cause he was captured” when his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War, adding: “I like people that weren’t captured.”
“The president is quite often very offensive, brash, says things that are outlandish,” McMaster said. “I relayed a lot of those in the book. But you know what, he’s an extremely disruptive person. I saw it as my job not to try to constrain him, but to help him disrupt what needed to be disrupted.”
The New Yorker reported in 2018, that Trump often despaired at McMaster’s dress sense and suggested he looked like “a beer salesman” in his cheap suits when he was out of uniform.
Cooper asked McMaster if he would work in a Trump White House again. “No,” McMaster immediately answered. “I will work in any administration where I feel like I can make a difference, but I’m kinda used up with Donald Trump.”
Asked if he would work for Vice President Kamala Harris if she wins the election in November, McMaster was less definitive but indicated that was also unlikely.
“I don’t know if I would be effective there either based on, probably, my difference in points of view,” McMaster said.
McMaster’s interview also coincided with the third anniversary of the bombing of Abbey Gate outside Kabul Airport, an attack which killed 13 American soldiers and over 100 Afghan civilians during the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
During a visit to Virginia for a wreath laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, Trump said he’d “get the resignations of every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity to be on my desk at noon on inauguration day,” adding “you gotta fire ‘em like on The Apprentice.”
Cooper asked McMaster about how Trump himself “touched” the issue, quoting a passage in which McMaster wrote that Trump’s decision-making set “the stage for the Biden administration’s humiliating retreat from Kabul in August 2021.”
“He couldn’t stick with the decision,” McMaster said, referring to Trump changing his mind about his initial choice in 2017 to keep a U.S. presence in Afghanistan. “He didn’t stick with the decision. And I think people were in his ear and manipulated him with these mantras of: ‘End the endless wars,’ and ‘Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires,’ and so forth.”
Cooper asked McMaster if he thinks Trump bears at least “part of the responsibility” for what happened in the withdrawal from Afghanistan—an episode Trump described on Monday as “the most EMBARRASSING moment in the history of our Country.”
“Oh, yes,” McMaster answered.
