Former Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster criticized US President Donald Trump over his election attacks on Face the Nation, but he really went off on the president’s recent announcement about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
Margaret Brennan asked, “Joe Biden is the president-elect. President Trump has no viable legal pathway to litigate his way to 270 electoral votes. But he continues to raise doubts about the election and to sow doubt among the American public. How corrosive is that to our national security?”
“It’s very corrosive,” McMaster said. “What concerns me is that the president’s kind of playing into the hands of our adversaries. You know, what I write about in Battlegrounds is how Russia really doesn’t care who wins our elections as long as a large number of Americans doubt the legitimacy of the result. And I think what all of us need to do at this point is to demand better from our political leaders, in this case, especially the president, that they don’t play into our adversaries hands and divide us further and reduce our confidence in our democratic principles and institutions and processes.”
He said it was a “travesty” for Trump to fire Chris Krebs and assured that “we have in place a transition that will occur” that the current president “doesn’t get a say in.”
He went on to tear into the president for “paradoxically” doubling down on “all the flaws of the Obama administration approach to Afghanistan” with the recent troop drawdown announcement.
“I think what happened is the prioritization of withdrawal over our interests led to us actually empowering the Taliban,” McMaster continued. “I mean, if we were going to leave, just leave, but don’t force the Afghan government to release 5,000 of the most heinous people on Earth.”
“It’s abhorrent what we’re doing,” he said.
