Former President Donald Trump’s second national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, would not serve in a second Trump administration, though he’s open to the possibility of advising from the “outside.”
McMaster, who served as Trump’s top national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018, told the Washington Examiner, “We’re kind of used up with each other,” though he maintained he “wish[es] him well if he’s elected. I want him to succeed.”
“I’m happy to assist him, members of the administration from the outside or really any administration once the election happens, right? I think we should all want whoever gets elected to succeed, but I think that I expended, really, my potential to really help Donald Trump from within an administration,” he said.
If Trump wins reelection, he will be facing “a much more dangerous world after the last four years,” and even if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, “whoever comes in is going to have to act in a very strong and decisive way to protect against those dangers, to lessen those dangers, and that’s going to involve a dramatic strengthening of U.S. defense,” he told the Washington Examiner.
McMaster acknowledged some concern that if Trump gets reelected, he could listen to and implement isolationist policies, though he added, “What I’m hoping for is that there will be enough voices who can help him understand better the cost.”
The “argument to make with President Trump” would be that when threats are not dealt with abroad and “reach our shores, that can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost,” McMaster continued.
McMaster named several GOP national security officials whom he believes could be assets for a potential second Trump administration including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Trump Nikki Haley, and several other Republican lawmakers. He specifically mentioned Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND).
The retired general recounted his time in the Trump White House in his new book, At War With Ourselves, and a central theme of it was the competing headwinds that he was forced to navigate by other members of the White House or Cabinet who had varying and sometimes contradicting interests.
In the book, McMaster described then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon “as a brash yet fawning court jester who ‘entertained’ the president,” who would engage in a “combination of sycophancy and agitation,” while he also described facing challenges working with then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom he wrote “had decided to run foreign and defense policy. They viewed the president’s disruptive tendencies as dangerous.”
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The former president is “susceptible to manipulation” by those around him, McMaster wrote, including foreign leaders.
“Trump has the opportunity to learn from his interactions with those leaders and the disappointing results from those interactions,” he told the Washington Examiner of the former president’s relationships with authoritarian leaders. “What I’m hoping is that President Trump will realize that Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to be conciliated. He needs to be confronted because what provokes Putin is the perception of weakness.”