You can all relax! Despite what you’ve heard from the horse’s mouth, Donald Trump is not going to send US troops to invade the Panama Canal, or Greenland.

How do I know this?

Yesterday I sat through a fascinating, on-record discussion with Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster at the Council of Foreign Relations.

McMaster, a three star General about whom I heard a lot when I reported Kushner, Inc, gave a humdinger of a talk. Perhaps he was motivated because he was there to sell his most recent book: At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. Or perhaps he was motivated because, as was noted among members of the audience, he’s not going back in to another Trump administration. He did not appear to hold back.

(His honesty could also stem from the fact that, as I recall from my reporting for Kushner, Inc. McMaster was often on a losing wicket in the Trump White House that must have been frustrating for someone used to an orderly chain of command. He was viewed as too moderate and anti-isolationist by the hard core nationalist/populist Bannon wing – and, quite often, also by Trump, who said aloud he had wanted to hire a General with more stars.

McMaster argued, for example, to stay in the Paris Climate Agreement (a battle he lost). And he’d argued Trump should add troops in Afghanistan, not withdraw (another battle he lost). Plus, the end of his very brief tenure of just over one year, was marked ignominiously when Trump rushed in the more hawkish John Bolton as a replacement.)

So here’s what McMaster had to say about Trump’s recent “let’s go acquire them” pronouncements on Greenland and the Panama Canal (which he acknowledged as “outlandish” or “what many would regard as outlandish”…but, he also said, there’s “something behind it”).

Whenever Trump speaks about anything, McMaster said, he’s basically asking four business questions…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates