The real reason for Donald Trump’s firing of H.R. McMaster
After weeks of buzz about the move, and stories about his potential replacements, Donald Trump is indeed firing his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, according to a new Washington Post report. Once Trump officially pulls the trigger, likely via a Twitter post if his track record is any indication, sanitized official reasons will be given for the move. But why is Trump really doing this?
The shortest line to draw here is that McMaster has become increasingly vocal over the past month about Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the threat it represents to the United States. He first made such remarks in public on February 17th at a conference, and he reiterated his anti-Russia stance again earlier today (link). We just saw Trump abruptly fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson one day after Tillerson publicly spoke up against Russia’s poisoning incident in the United Kingdom. But there may be more to this.
Various major media reports dating back to last year have had Trump wanting to fire H.R. McMaster for nearly as long as McMaster has been on the job. Some of those reports have said that Trump simply found his input to be annoying and useless, and didn’t want him around anymore. This means that McMaster was one of those guys who, along with Rex “f—ing moron” Tillerson, rubbed Trump the wrong way. He’s wanted to dump these guys for awhile for personal reasons, and he just never did.
We keep hearing media reports this month, from sources ranging as Vanity Fair to Bill Kristol (link), that Donald Trump is running around the White House fuming about how he wants to fire people like John Kelly, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and Robert Mueller. But these are the people he can’t fire without major personal or legal repercussions. Instead Trump appears to be blowing off steam by firing the people he can fire, like McMaster and Tillerson, because no one cares that much about their departures one way or the other.
