“There is no honorable way to serve a corrupt and racist president,” Paul Yingling, a retired military officer who served in combat alongside McMaster in Iraq, told me. McMaster has made out particularly well, with appointments at Stanford University, board seats at distinguished nonpartisan institutions, and a lucrative position at Zoom. “I don’t think that there’s a lot about Donald Trump that people don’t know already,” McMaster told me. Once again, Trump’s presidency is less a Republican anomaly than an intensification of business as usual. The fact that so many Trump advisers have landed in powerful positions suggests no one who served the administration is too tainted for a university, consultancy, law firm, or corporation. Interviews with 20 current and former national-security officials from the Trump administration show that those who worked with the president at the highest levels have been welcomed back into the establishment fold. Instead, like many of Trump’s early political appointees, he has leveraged the time he spent in the administration into previously unobtainable prestige and wealth. In a sign of what other departing Trump appointees are likely to encounter when they look for their next jobs, McMaster has faced no repercussions for any of this. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, would those who carried out Trump’s policies be held accountable? He stood by as the administration implemented the Muslim ban, he covered up Trump’s divulgence of highly classified military intelligence to Russian officials, and he created an entire national-security process tailored to Trump’s nativist worldview. Journalists described McMaster as part of the “axis of adults” that was supposed to curb Trump’s worst instincts, but during his 13 months in the administration, he more often used his own credibility in Trump’s defense. Instead, he talked about American values in the abstract and evaded Trump’s equivalency between white supremacist and anti-racist protesters. He emphasized that Trump wasn’t a bigot, and he offered no apologies on the president’s behalf. “The president’s been very clear,” McMaster said in 2017. McMaster came through to champion his boss. But on a Sunday talk show the next day, national-security adviser Lt. Republican leaders denounced his remarks. CEOs distanced themselves from the White House. When Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, many started turning away from the president.
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