H.R. McMaster hopes to “inoculate” Trump from people who know how to “push his buttons”

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as a national security adviser to Donald Trump, said on Monday that he hopes to “inoculate” the former president against outside forces that would seek to manipulate him should he return to the White House next year with a new book detailing his time as a top adviser to the president. 

“In writing the story, I’m hoping to, if he’s reelected, to inoculate him a little bit,” McMaster said on “CBS Mornings” Monday. “So he’s not that easy to, you know, to manipulate, you know, and to appeal to, you know, maybe some of his insecurities and and some of his predilections.”

McMaster, who served as national security adviser for just over a year and is a CBS News contributor, said the story he tells in his book, “At War With Ourselves,” “is in large measure about how our team worked together to help him make the best decisions,” noting that Trump would “at times, make really tough decisions.”

“But also, the story of the book is how difficult it was for him at times to keep that decision, in part because people know how to kind of push his buttons,” McMaster added. 

McMaster, who had a front-row seat advising Trump on national security issues, details in the book how the former president often struggled to distinguish sound analysis from other input. He discussed how Trump reacted to efforts made by world leaders — like China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — to manipulate him. 

McMaster also appeared on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday, where he expanded on Trump’s susceptibility to influence by world leaders, explaining that in writing the book, he struggled over whether to write about how “Putin tried to manipulate President Trump.”

“And I thought, well, Putin knows how he was trying to do it, so maybe in writing about how Putin was trying to press Donald Trump’s buttons, that will make future President Trump — if he’s elected — less susceptible to those kind of tactics,” McMaster said. 

Of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, McMaster said “we all want to hear more” about her foreign policy and national defense approach, and he warned of a “coalescing of what we might call an axis of aggressors” in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. 

“It’s a really dangerous time, so we need to hear more about what does she mean by ‘peace through strength,'” McMaster said. He continued, “I think what has been provocative to our enemies has been the perception of American weakness, and I think in the Biden administration, they haven’t helped that perception very much.” 

McMaster suggested his book could be instructive for the next national security adviser “put into place a process that allows that president to make the best decisions to advance American interests.”

“What I’m hoping is that a future national security adviser who might be working for kind of a difficult personality as president — you might see in this book how you can put together a process that can deliver good outcomes for the American people,” he said.