Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, the president seemed eager to associate himself with military generals, as if their toughness and battlefield experience might somehow improve his own stature. That didn’t turn out especially well.
The Republican brought on retired Gen. James Mattis, for example, to serve as his first secretary of defense, and Mattis reportedly came to believe that Trump was a threat to the United States. He brought on retired Gen. John Kelly to serve as his first Homeland Security secretary, and Kelly came to believe that Trump was a “fascist.” Trump tapped Gen. Mark Milley to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Milley also came to believe that Trump was a “fascist.”
And then, of course, there’s retired Gen. H.R. McMaster, who also served at Trump’s side, and who also came to see the president as utterly misguided. The Washington Post reported:
H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump and a retired Army lieutenant general, condemned Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s tense exchange Friday afternoon with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “It is impossible to understand why President Trump and Vice President Vance seem determined to put more pressure on President Zelensky while they seem to be coddling Putin — the person who inflicted this terrible war in Ukraine,” McMaster wrote in a post on X.
The president apparently heard about this, and published a related item to his own social media platform. “H.R. MCMASTER IS A WEAK AND TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE LOSER!” Trump wrote, in his usual understated way.
To the extent that reality still has any meaning, McMaster is a highly decorated retired combat veteran, who earned, among other things, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. A variety of adjectives come to mind when describing his lengthy term of service, but “weak” isn’t one of them.
Of course, McMaster’s criticisms from Friday were not the first the public has heard from him. Last year, the retired Army general’s book on his 14-month tenure as Trump’s White House national security adviser came out, and it was not a flattering portrayal: He described Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy,” complained of Trump’s “outlandish“ national security ideas, and alerted readers to the fact that Trump was a president who was “addicted to adulation” and easily manipulated by flattery.
But perhaps most notable of all was the book’s description of McMaster’s concerns about Trump and Putin. The Wall Street Journal published a striking excerpt, which began: “From the beginning of my time as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, in February 2017, I found that discussions of Vladimir Putin and Russia were difficult to have with the president.” It continued:
[O]ur relationship reached a breaking point after I attended the Munich Security Conference in February 2018. … [W]hat made news was the response I gave to a question from a member of the Russian Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly, who suggested cooperation between Moscow and Washington in the area of cybersecurity. After joking that I doubted there would be any Russian cyber experts available because they were all engaged in subverting our democracies, I described evidence cited in the Mueller investigation’s indictments of Russians for election interference in 2016 as “incontrovertible.”
Trump, McMaster quickly learned, was “furious” that his national security adviser had told the truth in public, and his “aversion” to McMaster soon intensified — in part because the retired general “was the principal voice telling him that Putin was using him.”
The excerpt went on to note a nerve-agent attack in England that targeted former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, which was easily traced to Moscow. Just a few days after the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, a story appeared in the New York Post with the headline “Putin Heaps Praise on Trump, Pans U.S. Politics.” When I walked into the Oval Office that evening, on another matter, the president had a copy of the article and was writing a note to the Russian leader across the page with a fat black Sharpie. He asked me to get the clipping to Putin.
McMaster ignored the directive, and confided to his wife, “After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.” A year later, those same questions continue to plague the same retired general who served at Trump’s side for over a year. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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