As for McMaster, he argued that it was more important to pay attention to what Trump did, not what he said. “We imposed more sanctions on Russia in the first four months of the Trump administration than the entire eight years of the Obama administration,” he insisted. What was more, he said, Trump sold Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine when Obama had not. (That was true but oversold: the 210 missiles sent in 2018 had to remain boxed in storage facilities far from the front line to serve as a symbolic “strategic deterrent.”)
