Former NSC Adviser H.R. McMaster-- Putin "Had a Hold Over Trump"

[W. Niederhut]

Vladimir Putin manipulated Donald Trump’s ‘ego and insecurities’, book says

 

Former US national security adviser HR McMaster claims Russian president had a hold over Trump in new memoir

August 21, 2024

Vladimir Putin exploited Donald Trump’s “ego and insecurities” to exert an almost mesmeric hold over the former US president, who refused to entertain any negative evaluation of the autocratic Russian leader from his own staff, and ultimately fired his national security adviser, HR McMaster, over it.

The bold assessment of Trump’s fealty to Putin comes in McMaster’s book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, published by HarperCollins and arriving on 27 August. The Guardian obtained a copy.

“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump,” McMaster recalls saying in the memoir covering the turbulent 457 days the now retired general served as national security adviser from February 2017 until he was effectively fired by tweet in April 2018.

The comment, to McMaster’s wife, Katie, came in the aftermath of the poisoning in the UK by Putin’s agents of Sergei Skripal, a Russian former intelligence officer, and his daughter, in March 2018.

While other western leaders were beginning to formulate a strong response to the assassination attempt, McMaster says, Trump sat in the White House fawning over a New York Post article with the headline: “Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics”. Trump, according to the book, wrote an appreciative note on the article with a black Sharpie and asked McMaster “to get the clipping to Putin”.

“I was certain that Putin would use Trump’s annotated clipping to embarrass him and provide cover for the attack,” McMaster writes.

He said he handed the note to the White House office of the staff secretary, which handles Oval Office communications.

“Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin, and very likely Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal, I told them not to send it.”

In reality, McMaster says, Putin’s apparent simpering over Trump was a calculated effort by the Russian leader to exploit the president and drive a wedge between him and hawkish advisers in Washington DC such as McMaster urging the US to take a harder line with the Kremlin.

“Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery,” McMaster writes.

“Putin had described Trump as ‘a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt’, and Trump had revealed his vulnerability to this approach, his affinity for strongmen, and his belief that he alone could forge a good relationship with Putin.

“Like his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama, Trump was overconfident in his ability to improve relations with the dictator in the Kremlin. The fact that most foreign policy experts in Washington advocated for a tough approach to the Kremlin seemed only to drive the president to the opposite approach.”

McMaster describes how Trump became obsessed by the Mueller report into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to the point that “discussions of Putin and Russia were difficult to have”.

He says Trump “connected all topics involving Russia” to the report, and allegations by Democrats and other opponents that his campaign, and Trump personally, had colluded with “Russia’s disinformation campaign” to swing the election.

Although special counsel Mueller found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy, he found multiple incidents in which the Trump campaign tried to obscure its contact with Russian operatives, and that Trump himself tried to interfere with or block the inquiry.

When McMaster observed at a security conference in February 2018 in Munich that Mueller had indicted more than a dozen Russian agents for election interference, Trump tweeted a snarky response that the general had “failed” to point out that the election result had not been changed or affected by the Russian efforts.

It was one of a number of broadsides from Trump that signified an increasingly fractured relationship with McMaster, almost all over Russia, that resulted in his ouster barely a month later.

“On Putin and Russia, I had been swimming upstream with the president from the beginning,” writes McMaster, whose successor as national security adviser, John Bolton, also ended up falling out with the president and went on to become one of numerous former administration officials to condemn Trump’s re-election effort.

McMaster recalls another episode in which he was castigated by Trump, at a July 2017 summit in Hamburg, Germany, which became famous for what the Guardian described at the time as a “budding bromance” between the US and Russian leaders as they spent hours locked in private conversation.

 

“My basic message during the final prep meeting at the Hamburg Messe convention center was ‘do not be a chump’,” McMaster writes, noting that he told the president what Putin sought, including the US to abandon Ukraine, and withdraw US forces from Syria and Afghanistan, which Trump later ordered.

“I told Trump how Putin had duped Bush and Obama. ‘Mr President, he is the best liar in the world.’ I suggested that Putin was confident he could ‘play’ Trump and get what he wanted, sanctions relief and the US out of Syria and Afghanistan on the cheap, by manipulating Trump with ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship’. He would offer cooperation on counterterrorism, cybersecurity and arms control.

“I could tell that Trump was getting impatient with my ‘negative vibe’. I said what I needed to say. If he was going to be contrary, I hoped he would be contrary to the Russian dictator, not to me.”

Despite the strained relationship with Trump chronicled in his book, and criticisms of the former president therein, McMaster never joined the ranks of other former administration officials eager to castigate him once he left office.

McMaster insists he remained apolitical during his service, looking out only for the interests of the US, and wrote the book to “get past the hyper-partisanship and explain what really happened”.

Vladimir Putin manipulated Donald Trump’s ‘ego and insecurities’, book says | Politics books | The Guardian

 

 

 

[Matt Allison]

Still does.

[W. Niederhut]

56 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

Still does.

We may never get the truth about Trump and the Kremlin, but I have long believed that Putin "has Trump by the short hairs," as John LeCarre said after Helsinki.

[W. Niederhut]

I'm posting this for Gil Jesus.

One of the most under-reported Trump policy issues in the U.S. mainstream media was Trump's surrender to the Taliban at Doha in February of 2020, and his insistence on the abrupt withdrawal of almost all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by January of 2021-- before Biden's inauaguration.

Trump abruptly withdrew these troops-- precipitating the rapid collapse of the Afghan Army and government-- against the advice of his generals.

Gil, are you familiar with that history?

Gen. McMaster says Trump bears some responsibility for chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal

 

By Jack Forrest, CNN

 3 minute read 

Updated 10:52 PM EDT, Mon August 26, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

CNN — 

Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, said Monday his onetime boss bears some responsibility for the US’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

McMaster told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the former president had made a decision in 2017 to maintain a US presence in Afghanistan, but that Trump then changed his mind. The Trump administration ultimately entered into an agreement with the Taliban requiring US troops to withdraw from the country by May 2021. President Joe Biden, after he took office, pushed that withdrawal date back to August.

“He couldn’t stick with the decision,” McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser from early 2017 until April 2018, said on “AC 360.” “He didn’t stick with the decision. And I think people were in his ear and manipulated him with these mantras: ‘End the endless wars’ and ‘Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires’ and so forth.”

 

 

 

Related articleGen. McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House

Asked by Cooper if Trump bears some responsibility for the heavily criticized withdrawal during the Biden administration, McMaster responded, “Oh, yes.”

Trump on Monday participated in a wreath laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on the third anniversary of the attack at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate that killed 13 US military service members.

Trump was joined by some family members of the fallen service members. The former president regularly attacks the Biden administration — and recently Vice President Kamala Harris, now his 2024 Democratic rival — over the chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

McMaster, in his new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” wrote about his perception that Trump often sought the praise and approval of strong-men foreign leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Philippines’ former President Rodrigo Duterte so he could be seen as a similarly strong leader.

“I’m trying to explain really the strength in some of the aspects of the president’s character, but also the vulnerabilities. And of course at times I was reluctant to write some of this because I thought I don’t want to give if he’s reelected kind of a playbook of how you can maybe manipulate Donald Trump,” McMaster said Monday.

McMaster breaking his silence on Trump’s tenure in the White House comes as Americans weigh whether they want to place the Republican presidential nominee back in the Oval Office or make Harris their new commander in chief.

 

McMaster responds to Kelly's characterizations of Trump

01:30 - Source: CNN

While at times critical of the former president, McMaster offered Monday a unique and nuanced insight into Trump’s decision-making process.

“I did see him learn and adapt and really evolve his understanding of situations. People would often say to me, ‘Does he listen, does he?’ Yes, he does. But oftentimes when he does come to what I think is a really solid conclusion based on talking to a wide range of people getting a wide range of views, oftentimes he can’t hang onto that decision and then policy becomes unmoored,” he told Cooper.

Trump tapped McMaster, a three-star general who served with distinction in the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War, to be his national security adviser in February 2017.

McMaster lasted just over a year in the Trump administration and was replaced by former US ambassador and Fox News analyst John Bolton — who himself released a book detailing a troubling and shocking series of allegations about his time working for Trump.

Asked whether he’d serve in a Trump administration again, McMaster said he would not.

“I think, Anderson, I will work in any administration where I feel like I can make a difference, but I’m kinda used up with Donald Trump,” he said.

And on whether he’d work in a Harris administration, McMaster said, “I don’t know if I would be effective there either based on probably my different points of view and what is a sensible policy toward the Middle East, or really fill in the blank.”

Edited August 27 by W. Niederhut

[Denny Zartman]

Imho starting the process of us getting out of Afghanistan was maybe the only good thing Trump did in his entire term. I give him credit for that, and I give Biden credit for following through with it.

[W. Niederhut]

34 minutes ago, Denny Zartman said:

Imho starting the process of us getting out of Afghanistan was maybe the only good thing Trump did in his entire term. I give him credit for that, and I give Biden credit for following through with it.

Denny,

    America's longest war, in Afghanistan, was a blunder from the get go.

    I don't fault Trump and Biden for finally ending the damn thing.

    But what sticks in my craw is the WAY that Trump abruptly withdrew U.S. troops just before Biden's 2021 Inauguration, then repeatedly blamed Biden for the ensuing collapse of the Afghan Army and government.

     Fox News and the MAGA propaganda establishment played along with Trump's ruse.

[Denny Zartman]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

Denny,

    America's longest war, in Afghanistan, was a blunder from the get go.

    I don't fault Trump and Biden for finally ending the damn thing.

    But what sticks in my craw is the WAY that Trump abruptly withdrew U.S. troops just before Biden's 2021 Inauguration, then repeatedly blamed Biden for the ensuing collapse of the Afghan Army and government.

     Fox News and the MAGA propaganda establishment played along with Trump's ruse.

I agree that Trump has no room to criticize how the withdrawal finally went.