One of the things President-elect Donald Trump’s second national security adviser liked about the neophyte president when they first met in 2017 during Trump’s first term was the commander in chief’s penchant for breaking things, especially regarding foreign policy.
“Trump’s disruptive nature could be advantageous. Many preexisting policies needed to be disrupted,” now-retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster wrote in his memoir, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. “But his impoliteness and capriciousness, in tweets or off-the-cuff comments to the press, were often counterproductive.”
“Trump’s disruptive nature created opportunity,” McMaster noted, “while his character and prejudices rendered him unable to take advantage of it.”
Given the choice between rigorous analysis and his innate instincts, Trump prefers to go with his gut.
He’s been that way his entire life, and it’s what he credits for much of his success.
“Instinct is far more important than any other ingredient,” Trump told Watergate reporters Woodward and Bernstein in 1989 as a New York real estate mogul. “The worst deals I’ve made have been deals where I didn’t follow my instinct. The best deals I’ve made have been deals where I followed my instinct and wouldn’t listen to all of the people that said, ‘There’s no way it works.’”
One of Trump’s big regrets from his first term was being talked out of withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan by McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis against his better judgment.
“My original instinct was to pull out — and, historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump admitted in an August 2017 speech crafted for him to announce a policy on doubling down in Afghanistan with aggressive new tactics.
This time around, there will be no McMaster, Tillerson, Mattis, or chief of staff retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to guide — some would say thwart — him.
And Trump says good riddance.
“These idiots like Kelly and Mattis are stupid, really, he’s so stupid,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania three days before the election. “And by the way, every one of those guys should have been fired for what happened in Afghanistan, every one of those guys.”
Trump, who promised only to hire the best people, says he was snookered during his first term because he was new to national politics and “didn’t know anybody.”
“I was not a Washington person. I was rarely there,” he told Sean Hannity a week before the election. “And now I know everybody in Washington. … I know the good, the strong, the weak, the stupid.”
This time around, Trump plans to surround himself with loyalists who will follow orders instead of slow-rolling presidential decisions they don’t agree with.
Take John Bolton, for example, Trump’s third national security adviser, who is convinced Trump will cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine in an attempt to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to capitulate to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial demands — and who once in 2018 teamed up with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to keep Trump from threatening to withdraw from NATO during a summit in Brussels.
“We succeeded, but only after ceaseless aggravation,” Bolton recalled in his memoir, The Room Where It Happened.
At his Lititz, Pennsylvania, rally, Trump called Bolton, who he eventually fired, a “dumb guy” with “that stupid face and mustache.”
“When you fire people, no matter how you do it, nicely or not, when you fire them, and they end up writing books, and they lie in those books,” he groused.
Trump says while America has a great military, some of its senior leaders, such as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, should have been fired and that this time, he’ll exercise his prerogative as commander in chief to remove them quickly.
“Don’t worry about the military,” Trump said at a Michigan rally in late October. “They’re not ‘woke.’ Only those people on the top are a little ‘woke.’ They’ll be gone fast.”
Trump describes his national security policy as “peace through strength,” a catchphrase used by everyone from Roman Emperor Hadrian to former President Ronald Reagan, and insists his top priority is to prevent World War III.
“We want a strong and powerful military, and ideally, we don’t have to use it,” he said in his election night victory speech. “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
Trump’s fourth and final national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, agrees with the president-elect on his oft-repeated claim that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had Trump been in office.
“I remember calling President Trump. We were out of office. It was about two weeks before the invasion,” O’Brien told the New York Times two weeks before the election. “And he said: ‘Look, they would never be doing this under Trump because they didn’t know what I’d do. Was there a 5% chance I’d send the Marines in? Maybe that was too high. But there was a chance that we would intervene decisively and defeat the Russians.’”
“That level of unpredictability — with Nixon, they called it the madman theory — not knowing what we would do but at the same time talking to the Russians and being cordial with them. This is something that people don’t understand,” O’Brien said. “President Trump was very cordial with Vladimir Putin. He was cordial with Xi Jinping. But he used that cordiality to tell them very tough, difficult things. It was much easier to hear when you had somebody speaking calmly, somebody speaking as a friend, someone not lecturing you, just saying: Don’t do this, because there will be war if you do.”
One of the first people to congratulate Trump on his election victory was Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who wrote the foreword to Heritage’s Project 2025 playbook, Mandate for Leadership, published in April 2023, which contains a “menu of policy suggestions” to “take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.”
“The DOD is also a deeply troubled institution,” wrote Christopher Miller, Trump’s last acting defense secretary, in the chapter on the Pentagon.
“Historically, the military has been one of America’s most trusted institutions, but years of sustained misuse, a two-tiered culture of accountability that shields senior officers and officials while exposing junior officers and soldiers in the field, wasteful spending, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and (most recently) the Biden administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates,” he wrote.
In the Pentagon chapter, Miller calls for bigger defense budgets, more nuclear weapons, an effective defense to deny China the ability to invade Taiwan, and more burden-sharing with European and Asian-Pacific allies.
But he also recommends a long list of changes aimed at rooting out what the document calls “woke culture warriors,” among them: eliminating “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs,” reversing “policies that allow transgender people to serve in the military,” reinstating, restoring rank, and providing back pay for service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, and abolishing “newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.”
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During the campaign, Trump had distanced himself from the controversy surrounding Project 2025, but freed from campaign pressures, he may find some of the ideas appealing, such as purging the Pentagon of obstructionists and dismantling the deep state.
“This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country,” Trump said. “I will govern by a simple motto: It’s promises made, promises kept.”