H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, on Sunday said that Trump needs "a competent team around him" because he is susceptible to being manipulated.
Speaking Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation," McMaster said: "He can make really sound decisions and disrupt things that need to be disrupted in terms of foreign policy, national security, but oftentimes struggles to hang on to those decisions and see them through."
He added of the Republican presidential nominee: "People know kind of how to push his buttons, especially buttons associated with maintaining the complete support of his political base."
McMaster was appearing on the telecast to promote his new book, "At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House." He is a retired Army lieutenant general who served as Trump's national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018. McMaster's book, among other things, describes meetings in the White House as “exercises in competitive sycophancy."
In an excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal, McMaster lamented how Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed Trump's buttons: "Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery."
Trump and his allies have continually argued that he is much better equipped to deal with Putin and other autocrats than his Democratic rival Kamala Harris because he projects great strength and authority, and she does not.
"Vladimir Putin, just like the Ayatollahs, have played Joe Biden and Kamala Harris like a fiddle," Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in a "Face the Nation" interview earlier this month. Trump has argued world leaders will walk all over Harris if she were elected president.
Talking to host Margaret Brennan, McMaster said he wasn't sure if he should document Trump's relationship with Putin.
"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. 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.
McMaster noted that every presidential administration has people who try to manipulate the president and said that if Trump were given smart advice, the president often made good decisions. One of those, in McMaster's view, was withdrawing the United States from the nuclear treaty with Iran in the spring of 2018.
"The narrative around that first year was all about chaos, but we got a lot done," he said.
Iran, McMaster said, is now a real threat. particularly given that Biden has backed away from some of Trump's policies.
Saying Iran "is willing to expend every Arab life, every Palestinian life, every Lebanese life, in pursuit of its objective of destroying Israel," McMaster said that the Iranian threat needs to be taken seriously.
"I think," McMaster said, "that the narrative that you constantly hear about turning down the temperature, escalation management, the reluctance, really, to confront Iran directly and impose costs on Iran, that actually gives Iran license to escalate on their own terms, with impunity."
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