Top national security official reportedly said Trump had the intelligence of a kindergartner
Apparently Rex Tillerson isn't the only Cabinet member in the Trump administration who looks down on the president.
BuzzFeed News reported Monday that at a private dinner in July, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster compared President Trump's intelligence to that of a kindergartner. McMaster additionally said the president was "an idiot" and "a dope," BuzzFeed News reported, while dining with Oracle CEO Safra Catz.
One source who spoke to BuzzFeed News said that McMaster also had harsh words for former White House strategist Stephen Bannon; Secretary of Defense James Mattis; Tillerson, the secretary of state; and Trump's son-in-law/opioid crisis solver/broker of Middle East peace, Jared Kushner. Five sources confirmed the contents of McMaster's table talk to BuzzFeed News, while a sixth claimed that the national security adviser has also questioned Trump's intelligence — or lack thereof — in private.
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Officials from both Oracle and the Trump administration rejected the claim that McMaster spoke disparagingly of Trump and the other Cabinet officials while at dinner with Catz.
McMaster, like Tillerson, has long been a target of the alt-right for holding "establishment" and "globalist" positions on foreign policy. Sources who spoke to BuzzFeed News said McMaster was also deeply critical of Trump's foreign policy positions — most notably the president's disdain for the Iranian nuclear deal. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council said: "Actual participants in the dinner deny that General McMaster made any of the comments attributed to him by anonymous sources. Those false comments represent the diametric opposite of General McMaster's actual views."
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Kelly O'Meara Morales is a staff writer at The Week. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied Middle Eastern history and nonfiction writing amongst other esoteric subjects. When not compulsively checking Twitter, he writes and records music, subsists on tacos, and watches basketball.
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