Donald Trump Can Be ‘Manipulated’ With Flattery, Claims Former US NSA, Says People Know How To Push His Buttons

HR McMaster, the former US national security adviser, said former president Donald Trump is susceptible to being manipulated. The 25th US national security adviser, who served during the Trump presidency, said his former boss needs “a competent team around him”.

“People know kind of how to push his buttons, especially buttons associated with maintaining the complete support of his political base,” McMaster said during his appearance on US broadcaster CBS’ “Face the Nation”.

“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 further added.

Donald Trump has argued on the campaign trail that world leaders will walk all over US Vice President Kamala Harris if she were elected president and that she cannot tackle the likes of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei the same way he would.

He told host Margaret Brennan that he was unsure about documenting Vladimir Putin’s relationship with Trump and how ‘tried to manipulate’ the latter.

“I struggled… 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 kinds of tactics” he said.

In an op-ed piece published by him in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year he wrote: “Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery”.

McMaster is a retired Army lieutenant general who served as Trump’s national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met twice when he was the US NSA.

It was during his tenure as US NSA that the two leaders met for the first time in person on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg in July 2017.

They had also met informally in November 2017 at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Danang, Vietnam.