When Donald Trump had a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin on the morning of March 20th, the two were at an excruciatingly delicate juncture. American intelligence officials had concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, with the goal of helping Trump win, and Trump had become the subject of an investigation, by the special counsel Robert Mueller, into allegations of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. On March 4th, a former Russian spy and his daughter had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury. Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, announced that the Russian state appeared to be responsible and expelled twenty-three Russian diplomats from the U.K.

Before a phone call to a foreign leader, American Presidents are normally supplied with talking points prepared by staffers at the National Security Council, which is housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Because conversations between heads of state can range widely, such materials are usually very detailed. But Trump, as a senior Administration official recently put it, is “not a voracious reader.”

The National Security Council has a comparatively lean budget—approximately twelve million dollars—and so its staff consists largely of career professionals on loan from the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “ ‘Thin it out.’ ” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’ ” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”

“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “THE WHITE HOUSE” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’ ”

Given Trump’s avowed admiration for despots, and the curious deference that he has shown Putin, his staff was worried about the March 20th phone call. Putin had recently been elected to another six-year term, but American officials did not regard the election as legitimate. Staffers were concerned that Trump might nevertheless salute Putin on his sham victory. When briefers prepared a card for the call, one of the bullet points said, in capital letters: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”

Trump also received a five-minute oral briefing from his national-security adviser, Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster, who goes by H.R. Before McMaster delivered the briefing, one of his aides said to him, “The President is going to congratulate him no matter what you say.”

“I know,” McMaster replied.

Trump takes pride in being impervious to the advice of experts, and he had no personal affection for his national-security adviser. McMaster, who had learned to pick his battles, chose not to raise the matter of Putin’s election. The President took the call alone in the White House residence, but McMaster was listening in on a so-called drop line. Sure enough, Trump did not read or did not heed the briefing card, and congratulated Putin.

Watching a beleaguered Trump appointee struggle to hang on to his job can feel like watching a tipsy cowboy on a bucking mechanical bull. By the standard set by his predecessor, Michael Flynn—who lasted all of twenty-four days—McMaster was a survivor, having kept his position for more than a year. “H.R. is relentlessly positive,” a senior official who worked closely with him told me, but his ride with Trump had been bruising. McMaster, a decorated war hero, has joked to friends that his combat experiences compare favorably with his tour of duty at the White House. Trump’s combination of bullheaded ignorance and counter-suggestibility makes him singularly difficult to counsel. Before the President asked McMaster to become his national-security adviser, he had offered the position to a retired vice admiral, Robert Harward, who turned it down, reportedly saying to friends that the job was “a shit sandwich.”

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But McMaster is “something of a Boy Scout,” a friend of his told me, and he accepted the offer. Much has been written about Trump’s infatuation with the men he calls “my generals,” and what his fetishization of military commanders might indicate about his autocratic tendencies or his sense of masculine inadequacy. There may be a more pragmatic explanation, though, for Trump’s preference: he has struggled to fill his Administration with experienced professionals. Many eligible Republicans disqualified themselves by publicly expressing misgivings about Trump’s suitability for the Presidency. Others just didn’t have the stomach for a shit sandwich. But the military prides itself on not being political, and officers tend not to have spoken publicly about their impressions of Trump. “The professional code of the military officer prohibits him or her from engaging in political activity,” McMaster once wrote. Moreover, the military cultivates a sense of duty. Bill Rapp, a retired Army general who has been friends with McMaster for thirty-eight years, told me, “For a military officer, when the President says, ‘I need you to do something,’ there is only one answer.”

It was easy to see why Trump had settled on McMaster, who had an impeccable reputation as a warrior-intellectual: in addition to excelling in combat, he had written a Ph.D. dissertation that became a landmark book, “Dereliction of Duty,” which was published in 1997. It chronicles the failures of President Lyndon Johnson’s military advisers during the Vietnam War. McMaster describes Johnson as “a profoundly insecure man who craved and demanded affirmation,” and notes that Johnson—who came into office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy—suffered from a sense of illegitimacy, a fear that he was “an illegal usurper.” McMaster points out that Johnson had “a real propensity for lying,” and that he surrounded himself with “advisers who would tell him what he wanted to hear.” The book’s title refers to the reluctance of military advisers to offer Johnson unvarnished assessments of the war’s progress. McMaster argues that they should not have allowed themselves to be politicized, sanctioning the lies that the Johnson Administration told the public.

Two days after Trump’s phone call with Putin, he fired McMaster. Someone in the Administration had leaked the “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” story to the Washington Post, and Trump was furious. Yet McMaster’s ouster had seemed imminent for months. As it turned out, Trump found the intellectual side of the warrior-intellectual annoying. When McMaster took the job, he had promised to “work tirelessly” to protect “the interests of the American people,” but the challenges he faced were unprecedented. What does it mean to be the national-security adviser when some of the greatest threats confronting the nation may be the proclivities and limitations of the President himself? McMaster’s friend Eliot Cohen, who was a senior official in the George W. Bush Administration, told me that, although they have not spoken about the general’s motives, he thinks McMaster may have believed that he was “defending the country, to some extent, from the President.”