Trump Gets the National Security Adviser McMaster Tried to Prevent
McMaster came to the White House to keep American foreign policy from going up in flames. Now he’s gone—replaced by a man with a blowtorch.
SPENCER ACKERMAN
03.22.18 10:59 PM ET
H.R. McMaster went into Donald Trump’s White House an unexpected, out-of-place fit whom his security-field allies hoped would restrain the president. He exits it without an active military career and with his long-cultivated reputation for integrity tarnished by his tumultuous year working for Trump.
And McMaster turns his job over to a right-wing foreign policy expert considered all but bloodthirsty and eager to encourage Trump’s most hawkish instincts—exactly the sort of figure McMaster’s many allies in defense circles feared would rapidly emerge in the wake of McMaster’s departure.
Late Thursday afternoon, Trump finally pushed McMaster out, the culmination of an agonizing few weeks of humiliating leaks that the Army three-star general was a dead man walking.
From the start, McMaster was an accidental national security adviser, hired abruptly after Mike Flynn flamed out and a different senior officer turned Trump down. His Washington—and global—profile was as a straightjacket on a president with whom he shared neither history, experience or temperament.
It was a circumstance bound to make their relationship a test of wills. And it proved to be a painful coda on an extraordinary career that saw McMaster become known as a unicorn of a senior military officer: someone who fought the Army’s instincts, refuted its perceived wisdom, and won. That status, forged in the Iraq war, made McMaster’s subordinate position appear all the more excruciating.
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