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HR McMaster, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, is warning that the ex-president is easily susceptible to manipulation, and needs “a competent team around him to help him identify his own agenda.”
“He can make really sound decisions and disrupt things that need to be disrupted in terms of foreign policy, national security,” said retired US Army Lieutenant General HR McMaster on Sunday regarding the GOP presidential candidate, “but oftentimes struggles to hang on to those decisions and see them through.”
Appearing on CBS News’ Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, he made the claim while promoting his new book, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, which is set to go on sale on August 27. In his memoir, McMaster lays out the policies of Trump’s administration to “give readers insight into what a second Trump term would look like.”
Now a CBS News foreign policy and national security contributor, he also said Trump can “make sound decisions” if provided with “the best analysis” and “multiple options,” but sometimes struggles to stick with those decisions “because people know, kind of, how to push his buttons, especially buttons associated with maintaining the complete support of his political base.”
In an excerpt from the book, which was highlighted by Brennan and also published in the Wall Street Journal, McMaster suggests Trump is at least partially susceptible to manipulation through his ego: “Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery.”
The GOP presidential candidate has boasted that the war in Ukraine “would not have happened if I were president,” and that he could end the conflict in just one day if re-elected.
Among the revelations in his memoir, McMaster wrote that following the 2018 poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, Trump asked McMaster to send Vladimir Putin an “appreciative note” when he read a New York Post story titled “Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics,” according to The Guardian.
The father and daughter were exposed to a lethal nerve agent, novichok, in Salisbury, England in March that year, and survived the attack following weeks in hospital.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung refuted this incident when asked for comment by The Hill, “this is nothing more than fake news 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,” he insisted.
McMaster announced his resignation as the former president’s national security adviser on March 22, 2018, following departures of several other high-ranking officials, including Trump’s long-time assistant and communications director Hope Hicks, who testified during his hush money trial.
