President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said Monday that he will not work with the former president again.
The retired general, who served in the Trump administration for 13 months starting in February 2017, appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 To promote his new book, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Service in the Trump White HouseTrump’s spokesman has already attacked the book as “nothing more than fake news” for its outlandish claims, with McMaster writing that Russian President Vladimir Putin manipulated Trump by playing on his “ego and insecurities with flattery.”
CNN host Anderson Cooper asked McMaster if he thought John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, claimed Trump called the American soldiers who were injured and killed “fools” and “losers” (Trump denies making these statements).
McMaster said the comments “seemed unfamiliar” to him, and that he had “never heard the president say anything like that, that bad,” but that he had “of course” heard Trump’s criticism of his “dear” friend, the late Sen. John McCain. He said In 2015, McCain was a “war hero because he was captured” when his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War, adding, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
“The president is often very abusive, rude, and says strange things,” McMaster said. “I’ve put a lot of that stuff in the book. But you know what, he’s a very annoying person. I saw it as my job not to try to restrain him, but to help him disrupt what needed to be disrupted.”
The New Yorker In 2018, Trump was reported to have often lamented McMaster’s taste in clothing, noting that he looked like a “beer salesman” in his cheap suits when out of uniform.
Cooper asked McMaster if he would serve in the Trump White House again, and he immediately replied: “No, I will serve in any administration where I feel I can make a difference, but I am tired of Donald Trump.”
Asked if he would work with Vice President Kamala Harris if she wins the election in November, McMaster was less certain but indicated that was also unlikely.
“I don’t know if I would be effective there either, maybe based on my different views,” McMaster said.
McMaster’s interview also coincided with the third anniversary of the bombing of the Abe Gate outside Kabul airport, an attack that killed 13 American soldiers and more than 100 Afghan civilians during the chaotic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan.
During a visit to Virginia to attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, Trump said: He said “I will get the resignations of every senior official who touched on the Afghanistan disaster to be on my desk at noon on Inauguration Day,” he said, adding, “You have to fire them like you did in Afghanistan.” trainee“.”
Cooper asked McMaster how Trump himself “touched” the issue, citing a passage in which McMaster wrote that Trump’s decision-making process paved “the way for the Biden administration’s humiliating withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021.”
“He couldn’t stick to the decision. He didn’t stick to the decision. And I think people were listening to him and manipulating him with these slogans: ‘End the endless wars,’ ‘Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires,’ and so on,” McMaster said, referring to Trump’s change of heart about his initial 2017 choice to keep the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
Cooper asked McMaster if he believed Trump bore at least “part of the responsibility” for what happened in the Afghanistan withdrawal — the episode Trump had been talking about. described Monday as “the most embarrassing moment in our country’s history.”
“Oh yes,” McMaster replied.