WASHINGTON — A new book from one of Donald Trump’s former White House national security advisers depicts the Republican presidential nominee as an insecure personality whose need for flattery and approval made him an easy target of foreign adversaries bent on weakening the U.S.
With his book, H.R. McMaster is the latest in a long string of Trump administration officials to write a behind-the-scenes account, a literary genre that has been thriving amid Trump’s undying grip on American politics.
Having served 13 months in Trump’s employ before his ouster in 2018, McMaster has written a book that is neither hagiographic nor entirely disdainful. He credits Trump with devising strategies to fight terrorism and recognizing that the U.S. needed to compete more fiercely with a rising China.
And he blames some of his old colleagues — notably former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former Defense Secretary James Mattis — for failing to steady a new president who’d come from the world of show business and real estate and had never held public office.
But McMaster doesn’t entirely absolve himself in the saga, either.
“I was able only to attenuate rather than overcome tensions with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who prioritized their control of policy over collaboration,” he writes.
“Tillerson and Mattis were not just confident in themselves; they also lacked confidence in a president they regarded as impulsive, erratic, and dangerous to the republic,” McMaster goes on to say.
“Regrettably, we all diminished one another’s efforts and our ability to make the most of our opportunity to help Trump make decisions, stick with those decisions, and act in the interest of the American people.”
Mattis’ office declined to comment on McMaster’s account. A spokesperson for Tillerson couldn’t be reached for comment.
The book — “At War with Ourselves” — will be released Tuesday. NBC News received an advance copy.
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the book “is riddled with untrue stories intended to use made-up, salacious fabrications in order to sell copies of a book that belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section.”
John Kelly, one of Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, told NBC News on Monday that “H.R. had a very difficult job while he was in the White House but served the nation with honor.”
McMaster offers fresh grist for voters looking for insights into how Trump governed in the past and might do so again if he wins a second term in November.
The book casts Trump as a flawed personality who not only presided over a chaotic White House staff but also did his part to stoke the dysfunction.
“The president, who was always game for gossip, intrigue and infighting, often asked leading questions to see if I might criticize Tillerson or Mattis,” he writes. “I never did.”
McMaster, a retired Army lieutenant general, was the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. He is also a historian who wrote an acclaimed book, “Dereliction of Duty,” about former President Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
The Johnson book came up during McMaster’s job interview at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence. He told Trump that one of the mistakes of the Vietnam War was that LBJ’s advisers told him only what he wanted to hear.
A better approach, he told Trump, was for the president to get “the best analysis and multiple options so he can make informed decisions.”
“Trump seemed happy with the answer,” McMaster writes.
Yet that’s not the decision-making model Trump employed.
“I was learning that Trump was open to new ideas and perspectives, but he was also prone to changing his mind based on whoever had his ear last,” he writes.
McMaster found parallels between the two presidents he has studied. As was the case with Johnson, Trump’s “insecurities and desire for attention left him perpetually distracted and vulnerable to a mainstream media that was vehemently opposed to him. Also, like LBJ, he had a loose relationship with the truth and a tendency toward hyperbole.”
McMaster gave an example involving — what else? — crowd size.
Soon after he took the job, he was walking with Trump from the West Wing to the White House residence. Trump stopped and pointed to a photo of the crowd assembled on the National Mall on the day of his inauguration.
“Look at that, general,” Trump said, according to McMaster. “Unlike what you saw in the fake media there were many more people at my inauguration than Obama’s.”
News accounts showed otherwise.
A lingering curiosity of the Trump era is why he wants to stay on good terms with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
In the book, McMaster said he was under no illusion that Putin wished to be Trump’s friend. Rather, Putin had sized up Trump as someone thirsty for praise.
“Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery,” the book says. “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.”
McMaster advised Trump before a July 2017 meeting with Putin in Germany that he shouldn’t fall prey to Putin’s claims about Ukraine, North Korea and other issues. But the subsequent meeting made it clear that “Putin used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him.”
During his conversation with Trump, Putin showed him a video about the Russian navy’s salvaging a World War II-era American ship, evoking fond memories of the U.S.-Soviet alliance during the war.
At a dinner later on, Putin gave Trump, a onetime real estate mogul, a list of ideas for collaboration, including the development of an amusement park near Moscow, McMaster writes.
McMaster said that he tried to warn Trump in advance that Putin couldn’t be trusted to follow through on his promises but that he recognized that “Trump was getting impatient with my ‘negative vibe.’”
Age has loomed as a major issue in the 2024 presidential race. Now that President Joe Biden, 81, has dropped his candidacy, Trump is the oldest presidential nominee in history, at 78. One question that eventually sank Biden’s campaign and now dogs Trump is whether someone of that age is up to the rigors of the presidency.
McMaster writes that Trump grew “cranky” during a 2017 trip to the Middle East and Italy.
Riding in his limousine in Italy, “he was getting tired and angry,” McMaster writes. “He turned toward Jared [Kushner, a senior White House aide and Trump’s son-in-law] and me in the far back and said, ‘How long is this f—— trip? Whose ideas was this?'”
Staff turnover was high in the Trump White House. Senior advisers came and went, because of burnout, principles or Trump’s disfavor.
“I couldn’t help but think that living at the base of an active volcano was an apt metaphor for serving in the Trump White House,” McMaster writes.
On the day Trump called and told him it was over, McMaster wasn’t all that surprised.
“With Donald Trump, most everybody gets used up, and my time had come,” he writes.
