2024-08-27 18:27:07
Less than two months before the US presidential election, a book is published that will not make Republican candidate Donald Trump happy. In it, his former national security adviser Herbert Raymond McMaster declassifies behind-the-scenes details from the time Trump was in charge of the White House.
McMaster titled the book At War With Ourselves and it covers the period from February 2017 to March 2018, which he spent in the White House as Trump’s adviser. The book comes out this Tuesday, but some passages have already been leaked and don’t bode well for the Republican presidential candidate. Trump will face Democrat and current Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election.
Retired Lt. Gen. McMaster mentions that some members of Trump’s team did nothing more than compliment him with comments like “your instincts are always right” or “never has the media been so hostile to any president.” Many of Trump’s views surprised McMaster, such as when he suggested bombing Mexico. Specifically, the places through which drugs are smuggled into the United States. The president also once said that North Korea’s military can be destroyed if its military parade is struck.
Lieutenant General Herbert McMaster. | Photo: Reuters
But the former soldier, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, devotes a large part of the book to Trump’s relations with Vladimir Putin. And he doesn’t hide that they quarreled about it and that it was the Russian ruler who was the reason for his dismissal from the White House.
“Trump was convinced that he was able to personally negotiate good relations with Russia with Putin. Putin is an experienced manipulator from the KGB and he knew how to win over Trump. He described him as a strong personality, a talented politician and played on his ego. Trump heard this ,” McMaster is quoted by the Wall Street Journal, which published some passages with the author’s consent.
The lieutenant general is said to have told Trump that Putin cannot be trusted, but the president didn’t really listen to him. In March 2018, he thought of calling the Russian leader and congratulating him on his victory in the presidential election. “I warned him that the Russians would use this against him and that the Russian election was not democratic, that he should not congratulate,” McMaster wrote.
In this Jan. 28, 2017, photo from the Oval Office of the White House, Donald Trump speaks on the phone with Vladimir Putin. | Photo: Reuters
Then, listening to the conversation between the two statesmen in the next room, he heard Trump congratulate Putin at the very beginning. However, McMaster writes that Trump’s predecessors made the same mistake in relation to Russia and in their assessments of their ability to influence Putin. In 2000, after the summit in Ljubljana, Slovenia, George W. Bush said that he saw sincerity in Putin’s eyes, while Barack Obama talked about the so-called reset of relations with Russia.
Corrected Trump
But McMaster is not only critical of Trump. According to him, he is capable of making good decisions, but he must be corrected and have people around him who understand the given problem. Even their separation was said to be correct.
“On March 22, 2018, at 5:30 in the afternoon, I got a call from the White House. ‘Hello, Mr. President,’ I said. ‘Hello, General,’ Trump replied, then told me that he had decided to go with John Bolton, which meant my dismissal. He thanked me for my services and said that he agreed with me on ninety percent of the things and not so much on ten percent,” recalls the lieutenant general.
Even his successor as national security adviser, Bolton, did not complete Trump’s entire term in office and is even more critical of the president. In his memoirs, he wrote that Trump has minimal knowledge of geopolitics. He did not know, for example, that Finland was not part of Russia or that Britain possessed nuclear weapons.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Army Mark Milley, in turn, in an interview for the book by the well-known journalist Bob Woodword called Jeopardy (Peril) he described how he tried to make sure Trump couldn’t recklessly use nuclear weapons, or how then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to “make sure” Trump didn’t make any reckless military moves abroad.
Close surveys
But foreign policy does not figure high on voters’ priorities in the United States, unlike the economy, migration, crime or abortion. Therefore, even the question of Russia or Ukraine does not resonate much in the election campaign.
But some American media indicate that if Trump wins, one of his candidates for the post of secretary of state would be Florida senator Marco Rubio, a longtime critic of Russia and the Putin regime.
Trump has always avoided direct public criticism of Putin. In a recent interview on the social network X, he told its owner Elon Musk that he respects Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He has repeatedly claimed that he will quickly end the war as president, but has yet to say how.
The presidential election in the United States will take place on November 5. The latest polls suggest that Trump will have a tough time. His Democratic challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, leads in three key states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and is closing in on Trump’s lead in several others.
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Spotlight Aktuálně.cz – Michael Durčák | Video: Team Spotlight