Transcript of McMaster was asked if he’d work for Trump again. Hear his response

You're joining us now as Retired Army Lieutenant General, HR McMaster, who served as the former President's National Security Advisor from 2017 through 2018. His new book on his time in the White House is At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. General McMaster, thanks for being with us. I'm in the midst of the book, and I'm really enjoying it. He says you got to fire everybody who touched this policy. As you write in the book, he touched this policy. He had a lot of hands on it. You write in the book, Trump established the first sound long long term low cost strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia, but then abandoned that strategy and replicated the Obama policy of negotiating withdrawal timeline with a terrorist organization, setting the stage for the Biden administration's humiliating retreat from Kabul in August 2021. You were out of the White House at the time that this was done. You write that you, quote, watched with incredulity and revulsion as he directed an envoy to negotiate withdrawal with the Taliban. You would not have advised him to do that.

Absolutely. I advise him to do quite the opposite of that in the run up to what was his decision in August of 2017. I tell that story in detail in the book about how really Trump made a tough decision and made, I think, what was the best available decision and put into place in 2017, the first sustainable, reasoned approach to Afghanistan. The war, by that point, had not been a 16-year war. It had been a one-year war, fought 16 times over. But you know, Anderson, he couldn't stick with the decision. He didn't with the decision. I think people were in his ear and manipulated him with these mantras of End the Endless Wars, and Afghanistan's a graveyard of empires, and so forth.

When he is critical of the Biden administration's withdrawal, which I guess the Biden administration could have not gone along with the deal that was made. Biden did push back. Trump had set a guaranteed withdrawal date May first. Biden pushed it back to August. Trump had cut troop levels down drastically, even though the Taliban was still attacking. The Taliban had allowed terrorist organizations, again, to have a home in their government, in their country. But Trump had his And on, I mean, does Trump bear part of the responsibility for what happened?

Oh, yes. I mean, so the whole premise of talking to the Taliban before you leave Afghanistan, why the heck were we even doing that?

He was going to invite them to Camp David.

Right. Even though Obama administration, when They made the mistake of pulling all of our troops out of Iraq in 2010, which really set conditions for the rise of ISIS and so forth by 2014. The Obama administration didn't negotiate with Al Qaeda in Iraq on the way out. And so if we were going to leave, why not just leave? Believe what happened in these series of negotiations and concessions to the Taliban is we threw the Afghans onto the bus on the way out.

They cut the Afghan government out of those negotiations, right?

Absolutely. So that was mistake one. Then forced them to release 5,000 of some of the most heinest people on Earth. And then began to withdraw.

The Trump administration forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban. Correct.

And then also stopped the active targeting of the Taliban, which President Trump, again, to his credit in 2017, had restored because he was convinced, How the heck does this make any sense? To give your enemy a timeline for your withdrawal and then say, Now I'm going to negotiate a favorable settlement?

It raises the question about the atmosphere within the White House, which you write a lot about. The portrait you paint of dysfunction in the White House from a management perspective is pretty alarming. You say Trump pitted people against each other instead of building collaborative teams. You say it was an administration at war with itself. Do you have any reason to believe that if there's another Trump administration, that it would be any different? Because doesn't that tone get set by the Commander-in-Chief?

As a historian, too, Anderson, I realized that that was not unprecedented. So one of the things that gave me solace as I was in that position was that, think about the first Reagan administration, how tumultuous that was. And so I knew that this was really nothing new. It happens in all administrations. But in the Trump administration, I think everything was magnified.

One of the things you said that it's got a lot of pickup. You told your wife, After over a year in the job, I cannot understand Putin's hold on Trump. But in the book, towards the end of the book, you actually provide some insight maybe on why the former President does seem to seek the praise and approval of strongmen. You write, I came to see Trump's embrace of Duterte, who at that point was the strongman leading the Philippines, and his braiding of me as connected to his struggle for self-worth. If he was accepted by strong men like Duterte, Putin, and Xi, he might convince others, and especially himself, that he was strong. That's really interesting.

Well, I think I had some time to reflect on it, and 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, a playbook of how you can maybe manipulate Donald Trump.

Every leader knows. Every reporter who interviews Trump knows. I learned this early on back in the first little bit around. He's the most susceptible to flattery of any public figure I've ever interviewed. I think every world leader knows this. You complement Trump in an interview, you can then ask several questions which are aggressive that he won't get as annoyed by because you've complimented the size of his crowd or whatever. Right.

Yeah. So what I hope is the President will learn from his first experience, understand Vladimir Putin, for example, will never be his friend. He has real friends among our allies who he ought to value higher and by all those relationships higher. To recognize, once again, as he did, and I tell the story in the book about how President Trump came to the conclusion that we needed to punish Russia, to inflict costs on Russia beyond the costs that they consider when they act aggressively against us and our allies. In that first year, the Trump administration, he puts more sanctions on Russian entities and individuals than the previous eight years of the Obama administration. He closes two consulents. He expels scores of Russian undeclared agents.

Although he was upset that you that the US wasn't expelling as many people as Russia was expelling.

Right. And as the Europeans were expelling, that made him angry because what he would often say is, I like the word reciprocal, right? He wants others to do at the same level, anything that we're doing.

You say that you hope he has changed and learned. Do you know a lot of 78-year-old billionaires, or alleged billionaires, who have really have big evolutions at age 78?

No, probably I do not. But I did see him learn and adapt and really evolve his understanding of situations. People would often say to you, Oh, does he listen? 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 on to that decision, and then policy becomes unmoored.

Well, that's the knock on him. And what has been well documented is that he listens to the last person who's in the So you can convince him of something, and he'll back something you say. And then, as you say, he talks to a wide range of a cast of characters who have access to him, certainly these days in Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere, and he comes around to a different understanding. That's got to be, as somebody who's a national security adviser, that's got to be, I don't know if terrifying is the right word or frustrating at the very least.

Well, the key for me was I saw myself, and this is one of the titles of one of the chapters, as a guardian of his independence of judgment. I wasn't I wasn't there to manipulate him into decisions or to feed him the information I think might lead him to a particular course of action. I was there to give him best analysis and multiple options. And that's one of the lessons I had learned from studying Vietnam.

I want to play some of what other high-ranking military officials have said about the foreign President after working with him.

We don't take an oath to a king or a queen or a tyrant or a dictator. We don't take an oath to a want to be dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution.

I think he's unfit for office. Oh, well, look, he puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country.

I think he's dangerous enough. He shouldn't get a second term. Bolton succeeded you as a National Security.

One of the many. But General Kelly has painted a really brutal, I mean, very damaging descriptions of things that he says the President Then President has said to him about wounded troops, troops who have service members who have laid down their life for this country, calling them losers and suckers.

Do you believe General Kelly that Trump said those things?

Well, I wasn't there, Anderson. I was gone by that time. It sounded out of character to me. I never heard the President say anything like that, that bad.

Well, you did hear him criticize John McCain, who was very good to you.

Of course, yeah. It was a dear friend of mine.

He denigrated people who were prisoners of war.

Absolutely. Hey, the President is quite often very offensive, brash, says things that are outlandish. I relate a lot of those in the book. But he's an extremely disruptive person. I saw it as my job not to try to constrain him, but to help him disrupt what needed to be disrupted.

Would you work in the Trump White House again?

No, I think, Anderson, I will work in any administration where I feel like I can make a difference, but I'm used up with Donald Trump.

Would you work in a Harrison administration?

Well, I think 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. But anywhere I could make it, it's such a privilege to serve. One of the themes in at War with Ourselves is, heck, we are at War with Ourselves. That's not only bad for our psyche, it's bad for governance. It's bad for our country. I hope that young people, if they read this book, will feel a call to serve because the tone in the book is not one of, that was such a hard. I mean, it was a privilege to serve in that.

It's a complex portrayal, and there's a lot of stuff you liked about what went on in administration, and you're also very honest about the things that you saw. That were disappointing. Absolutely. General McMaster, I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Anderson.

Great to be with you.