McMaster says Trump needs a ‘competent team’ around him

Former national security adviser H. R. McMaster suggested former President Trump needs to surround himself with qualified national security experts to prevent himself from being manipulated.

McMaster appeared Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” to discuss his forthcoming memoir that will be released on Aug. 27. He said that the memoir describes his effort to protect Trump’s “independence of judgment, because in any administration, there are people who try to manipulate a president into decision.”

“Well, I write in the book … about this dissonance that Donald Trump carries with him, these opposing ideas that sometimes he finds it difficult to reconcile. And that’s why I think it’s important that he has a competent team around him to help him identify his own agenda,” he said.

He said that Trump can make “sound decisions” after he is given multiple options but can sometimes find it difficult to stand by those decisions.

“What my experience was, during that first-year period in which we put into place a lot of these big shifts in policy, is, if you give him best analysis, if you give him multiple options, it’s in the comparison of those options that he can consider the long-term costs and consequences and make sound decisions,” he said.

“Also in the book, though … I write about at times, he finds it tough 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.”

The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt Friday from McMaster’s forthcoming book, “At War with Ourselves.” He told anchor Margaret Brennan he was not sure whether he should write about how Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to “manipulate” the former president.

“And of course, Putin is the best liar in the world. And so I struggled, Margaret, should I write about how Putin tried to manipulate President Trump, or not? And I thought, well, Putin knows how he was trying to do it,” he said.

“So maybe in writing about how Putin was trying to press Donald Trump’s buttons, that will make a future President Trump, if he’s elected, less susceptible to those kind of tactics,” he added.

In the excerpt, McMaster wrote that Trump asked him to send Putin a news clipping with a note attached to it following the 2018 poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung suggested that this incident never happened when reached 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 said.