President Donald Trump mistakenly called his former national security adviser—then insulted him with an f-bomb when it turned out to be the wrong person, it has emerged.
The president’s bizarre call to H.R. McMaster, one of his many first-term aides who turned fierce critics, took place March 3, just days before the Signalgate fiasco.
The call, which Trump began by saying “Henry,” was intended for South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, according to CBS News. The “H.R.” in McMaster’s name is short for Herbert Raymond.
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Once McMaster informed Trump that he was speaking to the man Trump fired in March 2018, the president grew angry.
“Why the f--- would I talk” to H.R. McMaster, Trump asked.
It was unclear if this was directed at McMaster or the aide who, according to CBS, placed the call, which was brief.
Trump then bashed the retired Army lieutenant general, whom he had described the day before on X as a “weak and totally ineffective loser.”
McMaster, on 60 Minutes, had taken issue with Trump berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during an Oval Office meeting, saying Russia’s Vladimir Putin “couldn’t be happier.”
“Because what he sees is all of the pressure on Zelensky, all of the pressure on Ukraine and no pressure on him,” McMaster said.
Days after the errant call, from March 11 to 15, top Trump national security officials participated in a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal about an imminent U.S. military strike against the Houthis in Yemen. The chat became public after Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he was mistakenly added to the group by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
In a statement Wednesday to CBS News, White House communications director Steven Cheung attacked McMaster.
“H.R. McMaster has completely beclowned himself and his third-rate book, which is now sold in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore, is filled with lies in a futile attempt to rehabilitate his tattered reputation,” Cheung said.
In his 2024 memoir, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, McMaster wrote how Putin “played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery.”
McMaster is one of many former White House officials the president hired and subsequently soured on, including Mark Milley, Mark Esper, James Mattis, and John Kelly.
According to Michael Wolff’s 2018 book Fire and Fury: Inside the White House, Trump reluctantly hired McMaster, who he felt didn’t look the part, but instead resembled “a beer salesman.”
During an interview, Trump, according to the book, also found McMaster’s discussion of global geopolitics boring.
