Putin manipulated Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery, former security adviser claims

Vladimir Putin played to Donald Trump’s “ego and insecurity with flattery” when the former president was in the White House, a former national security advisor who was later fired from office has alleged.

HR McMaster, Trump’s  national security advisor from February 2017 until he was effectively fired by tweet in April 2018, claims in his new book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House that Putin had a hold over the former president.

“Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery,” McMaster writes.

“Putin had described Trump as ‘a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt’, and Trump had revealed his vulnerability to this approach, his affinity for strongmen, and his belief that he alone could forge a good relationship with Putin.

“Like his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama, Trump was overconfident in his ability to improve relations with the dictator in the Kremlin. The fact that most foreign policy experts in Washington advocated for a tough approach to the Kremlin seemed only to drive the president to the opposite approach.”

The now retired general McMaster served as national security adviser for 457 days before being fired and becoming one of several officials who eventually fell out with Trump over his foreign policy approach, including McMaster’s successor John Bolton.

McMaster recalls telling his wife Katie in the aftermath of the poisoning in the UK by Putin’s agents of Sergei Skripal, a Russian former intelligence officer, and his daughter, in March 2018, that he “could not understand Putin’s hold on Trump”.

While western leaders were preparing strong responses to the assassination attempt in Salisbury, McMaster claims Trump was sat in the White House fawning over a New York Post article with the headline: “Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics”.

McMaster then wrote that Trump penned an appreciative note on the article with a black Sharpie and asked McMaster to “get the clipping to Putin”.

“I was certain that Putin would use Trump’s annotated clipping to embarrass him and provide cover for the attack,” McMaster writes.

The former national security advisor then said he handed the note to the White House office of the staff secretary, which handles Oval Office communications.

“Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin, and very likely Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal, I told them not to send it,” McMaster writes.

The author went on to argue that Putin’s pandering to Trump was, he believed, a calculated effort by the Russian leader to exploit the US president and drive a wedge between him and hawkish advisers in Washington DC.