Cruel Summer: McMaster’s Tour of Duty, the Debate, TSwift, and Yes, Churchill Was a Good Guy

President Donald Trump: In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country and it's a shame.

Bill Whalen: It's Wednesday, September the 11th, 2024. And welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be your moderator today, joined by two, not three, but two of our GoodFellows. John Cochrane is not with us, he is out doing the Lord's business for Hoover today. But in his absence, were more than capably taken care of by the historian Niall Ferguson, and former presidential National Security Advisor and geostrategist, Lieutenant General HR McMaster, who is in the crosshairs of the show because we're gonna talk about his book.

Niall and HR, great to see you. It's been too long, my friends.

H.R. McMaster: Hey, great to see both of you. And thanks again for the opportunity to talk about the book with two people who I admire. And, Niall, thanks so much for your advice. At the outset of it, when I was framing it, I didn't wanna name you by name because I didn't want you to be blamed for anything that's in the book.

But thank you so much to both of you for your support and friendship on this.

Bill Whalen: Okay, in Nixonian terms, that makes Niall Ferguson an undetected co-conspirator in this book, I guess.

Bill Whalen: But let's get into the title of the book “At War with Ourselves”. It is number two, HR, on the bestseller New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction list.

Congratulations, that is a coup, my friend. I'm curious about one thing, HR. I am a recovering Washingtonian, I spent half my life in that city. I've spent my life in politics. So, I've spent way too much time reading memoirs from people who spent time in Washington. There are usually two defining features to a tell-all Washington book, HR.

One is that the people who writes the book, the person writes the book, they use it to get even. They wanna exact their vengeance on people they think backstabbed them, threw them under the bus did them wrong. Secondly, HR, there's the unwritten subhead, which is that I was the only smart person in the room.

Everybody was too stupid not to take my advice. Now, as I'm reading At War with Ourselves, I keep waiting for that moment when you throw somebody under the bus or when you say, I was the only person who got it, everybody else was wrong, but it's not there, my friend.

Now, was this a conscious decision on your part to write a Washington book that is in many ways, not a Washington book?

H.R. McMaster: Well, thanks for asking that question, Bill. I really wanted to strike the right tone. I mean, I really did. I wasn't writing it to settle any scores.

I wasn't writing it to say, hey, if everybody had just listened to me. What I wanted to do is bring readers into the White House, into the Trump White House. What was it like? What is it like to be a national security advisor? What does an effective national security decision-making process look like?

What are the obstacles that one encounters when trying to put a process like that into place? What role do personalities and relationships play in trying to forge effective policy outcomes? And, of course, what is president's character? What is the importance of presidential character? And to consider President Trump in context of the eight Obama years that preceded it and the Biden years that followed it.

So I hope I make good on that while being still grateful for the opportunity to have been in the job. And what I really hope is young leaders will read it. Young people who wanna lead, who wanna serve will read it and say, hey, I can see what the rewards are of service.

Niall Ferguson: HR, congratulations on the book, it's an important book. So was the previous book where you set out the strategic landscape, but this one fills in a lot of the detail on what happened during that whirlwind time when you were National Security Advisor. I wanna talk a bit about how you describe the evolution of strategy, because, in a way, your book is a chance for us to understand how the national security strategy of the United States got fundamentally overhauled in the first Trump administration under your leadership.

That was an enormously consequential change. I remember reading that document when it first came out and comparing it with the document it replaced, which was the last national security strategy of the Obama administration, radical change, especially on China. Talk a bit about how the book helps us understand that process, given that you were doing it with, let's say, a somewhat erratic commander in chief as your boss.

H.R. McMaster: Well, thanks, Niall. I mean, what I saw it as my job to do is to help President Trump determine his own foreign policy, his own national security strategy. And to do that by fulfilling my duty as a National Security Advisor who is the, the only person really in the national security and foreign policy establishment who has a president as his or her only client.

By giving the president best analysis, by giving the president best advice. And, of course, we know Donald Trump is nothing else. But if he's nothing else, he's disruptive. And, I wanted to help him disrupt what needed to be disrupted. And, Niall, in terms of the process and how to frame his approach to national security, which is reflected in the national security strategy, or a specific policy and strategy on China, for example.

What I wanted to do was to help him by describing the nature of the challenge we're facing. And then, to consider what our objectives ought to be based on the nature of that challenge. And the way to do that with Donald Trump, and I think, really with any president, is to answer the so what question upfront.

Why does America care about this challenge to our security and prosperity? Because then you can view that complex challenge with the lens of those vital interests and craft an overarching goal and more specific objectives. And in my initial engagements with President Trump, I didn't really go much further than that because I wanted to make sure, hey, do you agree with this definition of the challenge?

Do you agree that this is why Americans should care? And do you agree these are our goals and objectives? And then we initiated a framing process and then the development of options that questioned the assumptions on which previous policies were based. This is something that President Trump enjoyed doing, right?

Cuz he would often talk about the stupid people who came before me and so forth. And in some case, I mean, most cases, I think all cases, he was correct that these weren't stupid people. But our assumptions were overly optimistic and were oftentimes implicit and therefore not challenged.

And so based on some flawed assumptions about the nature of the post-Cold War period, we had vacated critical competitive spaces, critical arenas of competition. And we were getting our ass kicked, Niall, by revanchist revisionist powers, Russia and China and their allies and so forth, or partners. And so we questioned those assumptions, and that allowed us, I think, to make the shift you described between the president's disruptive nature, his willingness to question those assumptions.

And the way we crafted our engagements with him around the framing of the most significant challenges we were facing. I think that allowed us to put into place this major shift in US policy.

Niall Ferguson: One thing that strikes me about the book is that it's clear that it's hard to keep Trump on that course of a tougher line towards China because he keeps going off course.

There's the moment where you're kinda telling him, make sure you don't fall into the old win-win Chinese terminology, cuz when they say win-win, they mean two wins for China. And yet, in fact, his inclination was often to ease the pressure, to look for some kinda deal to be done with Xi Jinping.

Talk a bit about the challenge of keeping Trump on that track that the national security strategy set out when his impulse was often to go right off it.

H.R. McMaster: Well, he understood fundamentally he was consistent in his understanding on the challenge from China and especially China's weaponization of its status mercantilist economic model against us.

So he was consistent on that, but President Trump, everybody knows this, right? This is not a revelation, has great confidence in his ability to make big deals, and big deals get him attention, big deals he thought were in the interest of the United States. And so in the case of China, what China does is wants the Chinese Communist Party leadership to string us along complacency, the American complacency is the Chinese Communist Party's greatest asset.

So China will string us along with false promises of liberalization of their economic model or governance or new areas of cooperation on, on global issues and so forth. Its all nonsense because what China is doing is trying to prevent us from reentering those arenas of competition that we had vacated.

And so as we prep the president for these engagements, we would show him the previous failed pattern of engagement with China, the working groups that have been established for so many times, and how they would never really bear any fruit. And of course, President Trump, though, was like, he's reflexively contrarian.

So what I would try to do is let him be contrary to Xi Jinping instead of me, so in these prep sessions, I would say, hey, Mr. President, this is what Xi Jinping wants you to say. And by the way, this is how President Obama or President Obama's national security advisor stepped into these rhetorical traps and I think that prepped him well, he didn't fall for those traps.

And then, of course, it wasn't just me, there were other really very capable people in that administration who were giving him the same messages, our cabinet officials, secretary of state and defense, but also Bob Lighthizer on trade. He's fantastic, a fantastically person and somebody who President Trump has a great deal of respect for.

So as a team and Matt Pottinger, gosh, that guy is brilliant on China, has so much deep knowledge, and the president likes to hear kind of stories and the history and Matt did a great job in prepping for these engagements. So I think that we were able to keep him focused on those objectives and of course, though, what happened is later in his presidency, he was attracted to the possibility of a phase two trade deal.

Remember, Bob Lighthizer had negotiated phase one, and the Chinese Communist Party leadership was holding out, dangling out this possibility of a really big deal that would be great for the American economy. That would address President Trump's main concern, which is really the trade imbalance in goods is what he really focuses on almost exclusively.

And I know that's problematic from an economic perspective, but that's what prevented him from maybe taking more decisive measures in terms of countering Chinese economic aggression, such as intellectual property theft under Article 301 of the trade law, 232 in terms of dumping of aluminum and steel. But then a whole range of other issues like overcapacity and subsidies for Chinese products.

So that's good, if Trump is reelected, all that's coming, I think he learned from that being strung along and he'll be less patient with Xi Jinping from a trade and an economic perspective if he's reelected.

Bill Whalen: You know HR reading your book was kind of like eating a Chinese dinner and that I was hungry about 15 minutes later, and I was hungry for Niall Ferguson's next installment of his Kissinger biography.

Because I believe, Niall you pick up in 1969, and not mistaken that's when Henry Kissinger started out as national security advisor.

President Richard Nixon: Doctor Kissinger is a man who is known to all people who are interested in foreign policy as perhaps one of the major scholars in America and the world today in this area.

Bill Whalen: You`ll correct me here, I think Kissinger held the job for six plus years, which makes him the longest serving NSA but he also holds a distinction of holding both National Security Council and state at the same time. And I think in your book, H.R, you mentioned talking to him and him joking about it's the only time the NSA director and the secretary of state got along, it was fabulous.

Let's approach this job a little bit from a design, I'm gonna get Niall`s thoughts here and what Kissinger has told him about it as well. But having served in the army, HR, where there is a pecking order and an understanding of power, there's a general and officers who take commands and go forward.

I always look at White Houses in design and here, Trump did something very curious, he had you at NSC. He obviously had a defense secretary, secretary of state, CIA director, but then he had this little rump caucus, this little rump group in the White House, which was Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.

And I saw that and that struck me as highly problematic for someone in your position, because why Bannon's the kind of guy who thinks he's always the smartest guy in the room and he's a free agent and kind of a wild card. Jared's obviously the son in law for Trump, it would seem that there was kind of a built in system that could cause chaos within the White House, am I reading that correctly, or am I wrong here?

H.R. McMaster: Well, no, I think you're right about that and President Trump is predisposed. I read about this, to kind of people against each other, sort of like a sequel to the deal to the apprentice the reality TV show that he, that he hosted. So it was a recipe for a lot of friction and tension but what I tried to do was bring people into the National Security Council decision making, policy making process.

Mr. Bannon really didn't wanna do that, I mean, he was actually more interested in manipulating decisions consistent with his own agenda and that made him like a less than optimal teammate in the West Wing. And especially when he began to employ tactics meant to undercut anybody who was nothing, who was not helping him advance that narrow agenda.

But what I found with Jared Kushner is he was a force for good in the Trump White House in my perspective. I mean, Jared Kushner was given some what people thought were impossible portfolios in the wake of President Trump's, or as President Trump was continuing his serial insults aimed at Mexico about building the wall and everything.

He gave that Mexico portfolio to Jared on top of the Middle East portfolio and a number of others. So I think that he actually over delivered, I would like to think that we were very helpful to him, I know we were. And I said, hey Jared, you can do this on your own with a small group of people, but it's not gonna work bring it into our process, we'll run a process that's transparent with the departments and agencies.

You can still drive the President's agenda as part of know the NSC process and you`re gonna have the departments and agencies who understand what you want to achieve and can be part of achieving it. And remember, I mean, remember, everybody was saying, gosh, its a fools errand to try to normalize relations between Gulf States and Israel and he did it with a great guy named Jason Greenblatt.

And with the support of departments and agencies, those guys drove it but you know what, it was a process that worked. I used the other example of the move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and we used the NSC process for that, I mean, our ambassador to Israel was reluctant about doing that.

Jared was reluctant, I said, hey, listen guys, this is the only way this is gonna work effectively and we did it, I think we demonstrated our role as the NSC staff, as honest brokers and we developed a great plan to do it and did it effectively anyway. I think that you're right, Bill, I mean, in any White House, this happens, right?

And I write about that in the book and as a historian, I was kind of familiar with previous administrations and history can be a great comfort because you realize you're not in an unprecedented situation.

Bill Whalen: Right.

Niall Ferguson: And that's important because I think there were many journalists who wanted to represent the White House of Donald Trump as uniquely chaotic.

And characterized by a factional infighting, but, in fact, it's more of a feature than a bug of White House politics. The Nixon administration was very different in the sense that the personality of Richard Nixon was very different, a president that Donald Trump admires, interestingly. But they really couldn't be more different because Nixon was cerebral, introverted, spent a lot of time with Henry Kissinger thinking through strategy in ways that when you read my second volume, HR, you'll feel pangs of envy at the way those guys were able to work together.

But what I try and show in the second volume, I'm still slogging away writing, is that there was all kinds of skullduggery going on as well. Machinations, palace intrigue, Henry trying to make sure that the secretary of state, William Rogers, was out of the loop in all the key decisions.

The kind of politics of secrecy, not to mention wiretapping, that ultimately led to the destruction of the Nixon presidency, all began early on in the Nixon White House in 1969, 1970. And so I think one of the things that I take away from your book and from the work I'm doing on the Nixon administration is that this is actually how American politics works by design.

Their separation of powers, in fact, means a kind of struggle between the different bits of the government. You don't talk an enormous amount about Congress, but it's another thing that is at odds with the executive branch most of the time. And so my sense is that for most readers, it's very valuable to see how the sausage gets made and to realize that inside every White House or inside every administration, there are these battles going on.

And this is not something peculiar, wasn't really a particular failing of the Trump presidency. It's actually kind of normal that that happens and we shouldn't be surprised. We don't hear quite as much about what's been going on in the Biden-Harris White House because there's been much less leaking.

But in the end, we'll find out, and I'm pretty sure we'll find out that there were all kinds of palace intrigues going on, the culmination of which was, of course, Joe Biden's departure from the top of the democratic ticket this year. So I think this is one of the most exciting things about your book.

We get to see the realities of policymaking, of grand strategy-making in the sometimes quite toxic context of the Trump White House. But I'm kinda here to reassure you, it's okay. This kinda happens in most administrations, even Ronald Reagan's. I mean, that's something that I'm learning from our Hoover fellow Joseph Ledford's work.

When you look at the politics of Iran-Contra, you realize that that was no shining city on a hill the Reagan White House.

H.R. McMaster: No, quite the opposite. I was talking to Admiral Poindexter. So one of the aspects of the book that I enjoyed writing, actually all of, it was a mixture of emotions writing the book.

But I enjoyed writing the part in particular about my conversations with former national security advisors. I talked to every living former national security advisor in person or on the phone within weeks after taking over the job. And the title of the book I took from what Admiral Poindexter told me, who served later in Reagan administration.

But he was talking about the first years of the Reagan administration. He said, hey, they were at war with themselves. And so that's where the title comes from. And it is a comfort to know that these tensions existed. And Dr. Kissinger, who is a friend of ours, and I know we both admired him, and I loved his sense of humor about all this too.

He recounted his perspective on it. And when I started to write the book, I did a Zoom with Dr. Kissinger just to get his advice on how should I frame it. What are the top themes you think would be most useful for readers to read about? And he said, don't do what I did with the White House years.

He said, I tried to write about everything. He said, just focus on several themes, and we discussed them. And I was reminiscing about our many conversations when I was national security advisor. I said Henry, as I look back on this, I faced a fundamental choice, to play the power games, to engage in the intrigue or just to ignore that and try to do my job.

And I think knowing that I'm a much less effective Washington bureaucratic infighter than he was, he said, you made the right choice. They would have eaten you alive.

Bill Whalen: I was gonna good naturedly tease you, H.R, because we're at war with ourselves. That's a line from Kanye West

Bill Whalen: He has a song called Jesus Walks, here's what he raps.

We at war with terrorism, racism, but most of all, we at war with ourselves. So I'm gonna call you Yeezy though, or.

H.R. McMaster: Well, I think also, hey, let's get over it, I think, is the theme to those lyrics. And it's one of the themes of the book too, is that being at war with ourselves is not only bad for our psyche in our society, but it's actually a severe impediment to good governance.

I think if you begin everything with a vitriolic discourse or that you're immediately in opposition to somebody from another political party. Then actually you foreclose on the opportunity to have a meaningful discussion about how we can work together to build a better future. So one of the themes in the book is, hey, let's get over it.

Let's begin conversations with what we agree on in connection with our most significant challenges and opportunities, at least from a foreign policy and a national security perspective. And we can get a lot done together. And a lot of the book is about my and our team, our incredible team's efforts, to transcend this friction that we encountered and difficulties and to actually get some really good outcomes.

As you guys have mentioned already, I mean, the national security strategy that Dr. Schadlow, our colleague here at Hoover, she ran a fantastic collaborative process while remaining true to the president's main priorities. And I tell the story in the book of this meeting with President Trump on the national security strategy.

And he tells Dr. Schadlow, he goes, I love this, I want more of this, this is great. Well, it's because we paid attention to him. And then also, as we had been crafting speeches for him on foreign policy across the previous eight months, we had worked in a lot of these ideas so we could run them by him and get his feedback.

And the speech that he gave in General Assembly, or in Warsaw, or at APEC, or ASEAN in Vietnam and in the Philippines. Or this first trip that he took when he went to Riyadh, to Tel Aviv, to Rome and to Brussels. So he was already on record with, I think, some really big ideas, important ideas that he's actually quite consistent on, border sharing, reciprocity, and trade, right?

I write about his erratic nature, but there are some things that he's pretty darn consistent on and he's not wrong about them. Now, sometimes, as I read the book, he's disruptive, but sometimes he can be so disruptive that he disrupts his own agenda, and sadly, becomes the antagonist in his own story.

Bill Whalen: My final question, I want both you to grind on here and the National Security Council, H.R, dates back to 1947. I think the first NSA comes in about 1953, but the council itself goes back to 1947 and it was the vestige of the previous Cold War. The question to you two gentlemen, we're now in Cold War II, a different cold war, does America need to revisit its national security apparatus?

And if so, how would you two redesign it?

H.R. McMaster: Niall, why don't you go first? What are your thoughts on this?

Niall Ferguson: The most striking difference between today and the NSC of 50 years ago is how much larger the bureaucracy is today. And I think the question I put to H.R is, did you find it an unwieldy bureaucracy?

It's striking to me that it was possible in the early 1970s for Kissinger with a relatively small group of talented people, to execute a very complex strategic maneuver. Which was to try to exploit the Sino-Soviet split to improve the position of the United States as it extricated itself from Vietnam to get the Soviets out of the Middle East.

It was a very complex multi-year strategy, but I think it would have been very hard to do with the kind of much larger bureaucracy that the NSC is today. Very keen to get your thoughts on that HR. You praise the people that you worked with, and I think quite justly, because you had lasting achievements, even though you yourself were ultimately fired by Trump and replaced by John Bolton.

What you had done not only endured through the Trump presidency, much of it has endured through the Biden presidency, cuz they didn't change the China policy in any meaningful way. So it lasted, but did it last because of this much more complex bureaucracy or despite it?

H.R. McMaster: Yeah, well, it's a great question.

I think, first of all, you have to think about just the size overall. Smaller is typically better because you're more agile. But you do need people on the NSC staff who have deep knowledge of a particular problem set, say, biomedical security, right, for example. Niall, the subject that you wrote about in Doom, it's important to have people who understand pandemics or who understand the most destructive weapons on earth.

And what effective techniques might be to prevent the proliferation of those weapons, or have the expertise of Matt Pottinger on China or Lisa Curtis on Afghanistan and Pakistan. And so I could just go on, right? Juan Cruz on the western hemisphere. So you need people with the right expertise, you also need people who understand the tools that government has to advance American interests.

You need those two critical competencies, and you want people who are respected and who know their role. That it's not their role to make policy, it's their role to coordinate and integrate efforts across the departments and agencies. So the number of people is not as important as the right people with the right expertise.

When people talk about numbers, the Susan Rice NSC grew to an unmanageable level. I think, in large measure because they were centralizing decision-making authority about tactical decisions rather than being farsighted and putting into place longer term strategies. So the size of the organization is important, but also the role of the NSC and how you craft the National Security Council staff's mission.

And how they go about their business in terms of are they a strategic or more of a tactical organization? But when you hear the numbers bandied about, a lot of times you neglect kind of the growth associated with Homeland Security concerns, which are relatively new. The National Economic Council, which has an international economics division to it, which is really important.

I think John Bolton got rid of it and it's back now, but it was super important to integrate economic policy and foreign policy and national security policy, really critical organization. And then also the Homeland Security aspects of it, cyberspace, for example, space is a competitive domain. So these new demands create new need for expertise.

But again, it's the right people. But also, when you hear the numbers of the NSC staff, what happens is the people who are in the situation room, the communications team, the protocol team. There are various admin people who manage clearances and do reception for new members of the staff.

All of that gets lumped in a lot of times. The relevant number are the policy positions on the NSC staff. And again, what's most important, the fewer is better in general, if you have the right expertise and the people who understand their role and are respected across the departments and agencies.

I mean, when I first came in, I put forward a mission statement for our team, that our team, it was supposed to focus on, and we did, on coordinating and integrating efforts across the departments and agencies to give the president options. And then to assist with the integration and sensible implementation of his policies and decisions, not to do it ourselves, but to coordinate that.

And then we had a vision statement for our organization, that we wanted to be valued and trusted across the departments and agencies and be a strategic organization rather than get drug into tactics. But you're right, it can become a behemoth, especially if you're centralizing authorities. One of the first things I did, I tell the story in the book, is I inventoried all of the authorities and decision-making that had been concentrated in the White House under the Obama administration.

And prepared memoranda for President Trump's signature to devolve those responsibilities and decision-making authorities back down to the departments and agencies. So, hey, China doesn't own the ocean. So why is the Department of Defense requesting permission to sail through the South China Sea? Or, hey, why do you have to request permission from the White House to have more than three helicopters in Syria?

So these were ridiculous constraints, and I think we got out of that business pretty quickly.

Bill Whalen: Okay, H.R, we're gonna leave it there. The title of the book, again, At War With Ourselves, my year in the Trump White House. It's available where good books are sold. Congratulations again, H.R, it's a smash hit.

Number two best seller of the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction list. Niall, he's making it hard for the rest of us to write books here at Hoover.

Niall Ferguson: I raise my hat to you and congratulate you, and it's a well deserved success. When you were trying to decide what to do next, I can remember pitching you the Hoover Institution and saying it was the perfect place to come and write the books that you wanted to write.

And I think I was right about that.

H.R. McMaster: Well, you're right, and a lot of that's because of you, Niall. I mean, when you have you and the other fellows at Hoover to emulate and to get to know, you have to up your game. I'll never be as good of a writer as Niall Ferguson, but you maybe aspire to at least be regarded as a decent writer.

Niall Ferguson: These are two terrific books, which are both readable and very illuminating on the problems that we face as a nation, both internal and external. So congratulations, and they richly deserve to be there in the best seller list. So, well done.

H.R. McMaster: Well, thanks to both of you for your friendship and support through the whole process, thank you.

Bill Whalen: All right, gentlemen, onto the B block. And all the brotherly love that you just saw between Niall and HR, we're now gonna do 180 degree detour from. Because we're gonna talk about last night's presidential debate in H.R McMaster's hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am spoiled here at the Hoover Institution because every four years, when I need to figure out what's going on in a presidential election, wait for Niall Ferguson to tell me.

And here's what Niall has told me about this election. It is the Barbenheimer election. And Niall, the master of pop culture, wrote a brilliant column not too long ago in which he said, it's the Barbenheimer election in this regard. The candidate's the Barbie, she's running on lightness and kind of good-natured cheer.

The other one's running the Oppenheimer campaign, darkness, gloom. You can figure out who that is. Niall, you watched the debate last night Is it still game on for Barbenheimer, or are you thinking in a different direction now?

Niall Ferguson: Well, it pretty much lived up to my expectations in that Kamala Harris did her best to avoid being pinned down on policy specifics.

And to project likable presidential, middle class, wholesome cheerleading, intellectual, political Barbie Persona. And Donald Trump became more and more angry as he fell into the carefully laid traps that had been prepared by the Harris team for him. And the angrier he got, the more he exaggerated. So that in the course of the evening, we had America destroyed by the worst inflation in its history, World War III just around the corner, illegal immigrants devouring the domestic pets of suburban Ohio.

So, yeah, it pretty much was Barbenheimer, I think, a hugely successful debate. But Kamala Harris, who avoided word salads, stuck to some very well rehearsed attacking lines, and got Trump to take the bait on just about all the issues that his team must have wished he could have steered clear of.

So you have to hand it to the Harris campaign, they prepped extremely well, and she delivered the goods. I was also struck by how very grating Donald Trump's voice became. If you remember, eight years ago in the debates, it was Hillary Clinton's voice that was grating.

Hillary Clinton: It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

President Donald Trump: Because you'd be in jail.

Hillary Clinton: Secretary Clinton.

Niall Ferguson: But last night, I found myself wishing that Donald Trump would just change his tone, maybe just once, from mad, so mad, mad as can be.

President Donald Trump: And all over the world, crime is down all over the world, except here, crime here is not through the roof.

Niall Ferguson: At one point, I realized that Kamala Harris's voice is actually somewhat lower than his. And she is very carefully working on a mellifluous delivery that I think will be going over pretty well in those households that don't want to be in a permanent state of barely controlled fury.

So that was pretty much a Barbenheimer evening, and as such, I think a box office success. Remember, Barbie did Trounce Oppenheimer at the box office last year by something like two to one in terms of ticket sales. On the other hand, as I pointed out in that column, Barbie only won one Oscar, whereas Oppenheimer swept the Oscars.

And if the Electoral College is kinda the Oscars, I don't rule out that even after a disastrous debate performance, Donald Trump can still win this election narrowly and maybe because of Pennsylvania. And this is really one for you HR. Here's my question, and I don't know the answer to this cuz I don't really know the place well enough.

How did this play in those swing counties where this is gonna be decided, places like Northampton, Pennsylvania, which went for Trump in 2016, narrowly, went for Biden in 2020, narrowly? Seems like the kinda place that will decide the outcome. How did it all go over there, that's what I really like to know?

Are people in those swing counties of Pennsylvania inspired by barbies, vibes, and joy and all that good stuff? Or are they really responding to Trump's message that the border was out of control, illegal immigration is a crisis, and there was a huge inflation mistake made by the Biden-Harris administration?

What do you think, you know this part of the world much better than I do?

H.R. McMaster: Well, I wish I knew it better cuz I moved away when I was 17 to go to West Point, and I've not lived in Pennsylvania since then. My family's there, my cousins are there.

And I think it just depends on maybe how Americans, how they regard not only the debate but the nature of the candidates. I think that Vice President Harris seemed like she was going to completely reverse some of her previous positions on fracking, for example, which is quite relevant in Pennsylvania, as well as the issues of border security.

I mean, the president really let her off scot-free on that, she didn't really talk about it, right? She talked about prosecuting members of transnational organized crime gangs. So, I just found the whole thing so disappointing, I think a lot of my fellow Pennsylvanians will feel the same way because I just got a sense of missed opportunity to really hear what the candidates think.

I mean, there were a couple of issues here and there that illuminated maybe a predisposition in a certain direction on foreign policy, national security, energy security and energy policy, economic policy. I mean, there could have been so much more we could have heard from both candidates because as you alluded to Niall, it was performative rather than formative.

And, Bill, you're the politics expert here, how big of an impact do you think? I think what is clearly a Vice President Harris win, I mean, I'm not a good judge of this kinda stuff.

Bill Whalen: Look, you wanna do performative, she performed better by far. Niall was right, Trump was offense reminder, this is the third time he's done this, this is not the Trump of eight years ago, not the Trump you knew in 2017 H.R. She was far better in performance, she was far better prepared.

Yeah, she got a lot of help from ABC, let's not gloss over that. It's important to note we're doing this in the bubble right now, it's less than 24 hours after the debate and we all get a little overworked about this. Let's see what the polls move. I would caution one thing, I'm not being partisan here, she had a very good run for about a month.

And then you might have noticed Niall and H.R, the polls kind of cooled down for her and the race got back to where it would have been with the normal Joe Biden had he not dropped out of the race. So let's see, in a couple of weeks from now, if we restore.

But Niall, getting back to the Barbenheimer idea, there's a very famous Pennsylvanian who jumped in the race last night, Taylor Swift, Tay Tay.

Bill Whalen: Let's talk a bit about the Taylor effect. And here, my friend, I want you to choose your words carefully because she has 95.2 million followers on X, Niall, and they fight fiercely for her.

So be careful of talking about Tay Tay, but she has now endorsed them. Is anything like that possibly a game-changer, Niall, or I'm just reading too much into pop culture and celebrities here?

Niall Ferguson: Well, I think it's important because this election looks like being the most gender-polarized election we've ever seen in the United States.

The gap between male and female voters, even before last night's debate, was very striking, something like 11% points. And of course, an endorsement from Taylor Swift delivers, I presume, a significant number of young women. Especially in just the same way that the opening exchanges on the issue of abortion were calculated by the Harris campaign to resonate with female voters.

So if this election is differentiated by anything compared with, say, 2020 or 2016, I think it's this. That there's gonna be a big, big divide between the male and female vote, especially amongst younger voters, where we see a very striking phenomenon. And not only in the United States, we can see it in the UK, too, we can see it in Europe, we can see it in South Korea.

Young men are trending right and young women are trending left in a way that I don't think we've seen before. So that's the significance of Taylor Swift weighing in. And it was a well-timed endorsement after Donald Trump had been the quintessential angry old man. And Kamala Harris had played very successfully, the empowered, powerful and confident woman.

So, yeah, I think this is the big issue in this election. She has to foreground what they call reproductive rights, but I'm gonna call abortion. Cuz that's an issue that is very difficult for Republicans, that divides Republicans. Where Donald Trump is not in sync with quite significant parts of his party, especially in Bible Belt states.

For Trump, the issues that matter are immigration, inflation, and the economy more generally. And I think his signal failure last night was to make those issues the focus and make her as an integral part of the Biden administration responsible for the problems of the last three and a half years.

By failing to do that, I think he cost himself quite significantly. But you're right, Bill, in the end everything in this day and age has a news cycle life of what? Two weeks? Even a near assassination of a presidential candidate was a news story to me and astonishingly in a short time we'll have forgotten about this debate.

Probably by the next GoodFellas episode.

Bill Whalen: Okay, four things about this debate, which I wanna quickly point out to you. And I want your thoughts on which one of these bothers you the most. Niall, there was no mention of the Ferguson law. The concept that great powers, when they end up spending more on debt service and the military, they're screwed.

So no mention of that. H.R, no pushback when Kamala Harris said the following. Quote, as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone at any war zone around the world. Niall, no mention about what's going on in campuses and cancel culture and anti Semitism.

H.R, no conversation, you can appreciate this, having briefed a president every day for a year. No discussion about what Kamala Harris knew or didn't know about Joe Biden's cognitive state. So, H.R, which of those four things concerns you the most?

H.R. McMaster: Well, I guess, predictably, I'll say that there are no US servicemen and women in harm's way around the world or engaged with enemies around the world.

Well, it's been really not reported very much, but ISIS has become much, much more active in Syria and in Iraq. US Central command, where my friend Eric Carroll is the commander who's just a fantastic officer and as good of a rugby player. He's an absolute animal on the rugby pitch.

This is a guy who was shot in the leg in an alleyway in Mosul and chased down the terrorists with a knife. I mean, he is one hard man, but he's also very competent. He just reported that there have been twice as many raids against ISIS and twice as many ISIS related attacks in Iraq and in Syria.

And ISIS is trying to regain control of territory and become an even greater threat. And so those soldiers are in harm's way. Iran, through their proxies, is attacking our forces across the Middle East. And the Biden administration still doesn't wanna act like they didn't know what the return address is.

So maybe that's why she doesn't think we're engaged with enemies. Because we haven't recognized that Iraq, through their proxies and now also directly, now are engaging in acts of war against us. And then think about what's happening the Bob Ellman Deb, with the multiple attacks on shipping and on our naval vessels.

Every one of those intercepts of a shorter ship missile is a diving catch, right? I mean, I could go on about this, about how aggressive China is becoming in the South China Sea, the seven acts of aggression against the Philippines, a US ally? And guess what? We do have troops out there.

So I just think that it was sort of a Pollyannaish depiction of the state of the world. And that was maybe what disappointed me most about her statements.

Bill Whalen: What about you, Niall?

Niall Ferguson: Well, whoever wins this election is gonna be dealing with one hell of a fiscal mess.

I'm sorry, John Cochrane's not here to agree with me, but the growth of the debt over the last decade really has created a huge problem. And the problem is because with higher rates, servicing that debt starts to consume an ever larger share of the federal budget. My jokey Ferguson's law is no joke.

Actually the US government is now spending more on interest payments and the federal debt than on national security. And the Biden-Harris policy implies a squeeze of the defense budget at a time when we really need to be investing in strengthening our military. Otherwise we will not have deterrence in the various theaters where the increasingly aligned authoritarian powers are threatening us.

So I think to have two presidential candidates say virtually nothing about those fiscal problems was a really lost opportunity. And it would have been nice if the moderators had asked them about it. How are you gonna clean up the mess of a deficit of 7% of GDP or whatever it now is at a time of near full unemployment?

How will you cope when the economy slows down and that deficit gets even larger? But that wasn't the kind of question that the anchors were interested in asking last night.

Bill Whalen: Okay, we have about a minute left, a quick question. It's a mousetrap question, Niall and H.R. How can you design a better debate?

I have one solution for you. Let the journalists allow the candidates to ask each other questions as we get a warped view from the moderators themselves. There was the obligatory climate change question. I wanted to throw a brick through my screen on the answers cuz I read polls religiously.

Climate change just does not resonate the same as the economy or the border foreign policy, but yet they have to ask a climate change question. But Niall and H.R, if you could change one thing about the debate process here in the US if any, what would you change?

H.R. McMaster: It's a great question, but we have to try to get to more substance. Something about when I debated in high school and you had a resolution and you had the affirmative and negative team. Maybe even provide some of the questions in advance, knowing that the candidates will take an affirmative or negative position.

And make it an argument for or against that proposition and then afford a short rebuttal time for both of them. More in lines of the rules of collegiate debates. I just think we've gotta do something to try to force the candidates to answer the questions. What would their policies be?

What would they really do?

Niall Ferguson: My view is that these aren't debates. And the reason that they're so frustrating is that we don't really have a culture of debate in this country anymore. Even student debating has been severely damaged by workism. So that it's impossible, in fact, to have the kind of debates that you and I had when we were young.

So we need to revive debating as an activity. Perhaps it's part of the educational renewal that I'm so concerned with, if we want to see presidential candidates engaging in real debate. My one reform, let's have an audience. Having these dead, empty studios is not the right way for a political argument to be made.

Democracy is about the people. And having the people sat watching this on their TVs instead of at least being represented in the auditorium, seems to me in itself to be a mistake. So I'd like to bring the audience back.

Bill Whalen: Not exactly Lincoln Douglas, is it, Niall?

Niall Ferguson: No, that would be my reform. Bring back the audience.

Bill Whalen: Yeah, I would add one more thing. We need at least one more debate here because you just can't cram everything into 90 minutes. I'm the only single guy in the show, It's like watching two people speed date for 90 minutes. It was just very shallow conversations and nothing substantive but And now onto the lightning round.

Okay, gentlemen, let's begin quick question here. We're recording the show on the 23rd anniversary of the 911 attacks on America, very quickly, where were you to that day?

H.R. McMaster: I was in Germany, command of a cavalry squadron. We had a short respite in between a force on force maneuver exercise, and a continuation of that exercise. And, I resolved at that moment, obviously, to continue to train our unit and get us ready to fight. I did not command that squadron when it did go into combat, but it did go into combat several years later. And, of course, it was a huge change for our armed forces as we pursued the enemies of all civilization in Afghanistan, and then had the subsequent war in Iraq as well. So, yeah, I was in Germany and in Schweinfurt, Germany.

Bill Whalen: Niall.

Niall Ferguson: I was in Oxford, and I watched on a rather dodgy dial up Internet connection. The twin towers of the World Trade center crash down. And I realized at that moment that I had to come to the United States. And I very shortly afterwards said to New York University and to Harvard that I was interested in moving from Oxford. And NYU faxed back an offer almost the next day, and I accepted it.

I had been due to give a lecture at NYU on September 12, and, of course, never flew. So for me, it was a decisive moment. It was one of the critical reasons why I moved to the United States, because one had to rally round at that point. And NYU is the university closest to ground zero.

So I taught there for two years, and two very happy years they were. But there were years that I spent in the city that had been deeply, deeply scarred by the events that unfolded 23 years ago.

Bill Whalen: Okay, gentlemen, next question. A would-be historian goes on Tucker Carlson's show, and he says that Winston Churchill was, quote, the chief villain of World War II.

Our friend and colleague, the Lord Andrew Roberts, calls it a display of, quote, staggering ignorance. Our genius historian Niall Ferguson calls it the return of anti history. You're both historians, tell me what's going on here, Neil.

Niall Ferguson: Well, he's not a historian, and for Tucker Carlson to present him as an historian was a kind of deception in itself.

Darryl Cooper's never published a history book, and his various contributions on podcasts and on social media amount, at this point, to nothing much more than resurrecting Nazi propaganda. And that's all he did in his interview with Tucker Carlson, to basically reheat the arguments that the national socialist regime made in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly that Churchill was the warmonger, that he had Jewish financial backers, that Hitler, in fact, only wanted peace. 

I found it astonishing that these old Nazi tropes straight out of the Goebbels playbook should have been given any prominence at all on a podcast of any kind. And the fact that it attracted so much public interest deeply depressed me, because it taught me that a great many people are unable to discern nazi propaganda when they hear it.

Bill Whalen: HR, it gets worse, our friend Barry Weiss points out that Darryl Cooper also suggested Adolf Hitler is in heaven. He's also suggested the Romans were sent by God to eradicate the Jews. He's also said the Holocaust wasn't so much a planned genocide as it was the fact that the Nazis took so many damn prisoners, they had to kill a few million people. 

Why does Tucker do this, HR?

H.R. McMaster: Well, gosh, I mean, I don't know, I mean, he's a charlatan. He's a grifter, he's a demagogue. I mean, you'd have to ask him, what is his motivation? I mean, I would like to think he's a pretty intelligent guy. He's got to know better.

So I think what he's willing to do for his own kind of fealty of his base of supporters is to engage in this kind of demagoguery. I really don't have much to add beyond the two excellent essays by my colleagues. And one of the reasons I'm so proud to be here at Hoover are the essays that appeared in the free press by Niall and by Victor Davis Hansen, which took this all apart.

So I think that it's really important for all of us to stand up to this kind of demagoguery and to call this individual out for who he is, as well as anybody who gives him airtime, like Tucker Carlson.

Bill Whalen: All right, gentlemen, final question. It is close to voting time in America right now. 

We mentioned that Taylor Swift has come out in favor of Kamala Harris. You know who else came out with Kamala Harris? Dick Cheney, yes, the Dick Cheney, as well as his daughter, Liz Cheney. Question for you, gentlemen. Is it okay for conservatives to endorse a Democrat over a Republican?

In other words, in this election you have a choice of conscience, but you also have a choice of what's gonna happen the next four years depending on who wins. So Niall, how do we process, in terms of conservatives and how they vote?

Niall Ferguson: This is an old american playbook.

There were Democrats for Nixon. Nixon spent a good deal of time trying to find people on the other side that would come over to him, like John Connolly, the great Texan.

Bill Whalen: He brought out Franklin Roosevelt's son in 1960, I believe, to support.

Niall Ferguson: So I think this is traditional politics as we know and love it and America, don't ever change.

Bill Whalen: Okay, HR, I'll give you the last word.

H.R. McMaster: Hey, well, this is not my scene typically, but you do have, I think, this effort to recruit people from the other side. And actually I think it's, it's healthy to do it. I think our founders warned against faction, and I think that so many Americans also know the danger of that.

I mean, look at how many Americans now identify or have identified themselves or register as independents. I mean, I think it's because they're unhappy with the shrinking tense of each political party and the pandering of those political parties to their most loyal base, especially through the primary process, which then delivers candidates with whom the vast majority of Americans are unhappy.

So I think maybe this is a breakdown, a little bit of this obsession with faction.

Bill Whalen: I think you're right. Well, you guys know who has very strong feelings about this. Victor Davis Hanson, who is going to be our next guest on Goodfellas at the end of the month.

The bad news, the international man of history is not going to be with us. I think Neil is going to have a scheduling conflict. We're going to have to deal without him. But John Cochran will be back and I think we're going to talk about this and various other things with Victor.

You know how you make sure you will not miss Goodfellows, subscribe to our show, rate us, review us, say some kind things about us, pass the word about us. Also sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which means that anytime that Niall and HR are on the news, you will find out about it.

And you find that by going to the Hoover Institution website, which is hoover.org. On behalf of two thirds of our Goodfellows today, Niall Ferguson and HR McMaster, the missing John Cochran, we hope today's show is great to have the boys back in camp with us today. Look forward to the next show.

Until then, guys, take care, everybody out there, thanks for watching. so long.

Donald Trump: My dog was taken and used for food, so maybe he said that and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.

Speaker 5: I'm not taking this from television

Donald Trump: was eaten by the people that went there.

Speaker 5: Again, the Springfield city manager says there's no evidence of that. Vice President Harris, I'll let you respond to the rest of what you've heard.

Vice President Harris: You talk about extreme.

Host: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available @hoover.org.