Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland is one of the country’s most prominent foreign policy experts. A leader in setting the conservative national security agenda, she is a frequent television and radio commentator, columnist and author. Her bestselling book Revolution: Trump, Washington and “We the People” has been hailed as a modern-day classic. It not only offers unique insight into the Trump presidency and Mueller investigation, but also thoughtful reflections on American history and exceptionalism.
Ms. McFarland was President Trump’s first Deputy National Security Advisor, starting with the Trump Tower Transition and through the early months of the Administration. She was one of the architects of his America First and Peace through Strength policies.
Prior to her role in the Trump White House, KT was a FOX News National Security Analyst and appeared daily on all FOX and FOX Business News programs. She anchored FOXNews.com’s DEFCON3 and wrote a regular column for the FOX News opinion page. During this period, she was a regular guest on several national radio shows. Ms. McFarland held national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations as an aide to Dr. Henry Kissinger, member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Staff, Senior Speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and later Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Pentagon spokesman. Among other accolades, she drafted the Weinberger Doctrine speech which laid out the Reagan Administration’s policy on use of force and the first draft of President Reagan’s Star Wars speech.
In 1985, Ms. McFarland received the Defense Department’s highest civilian honor, the Distinguished Service Award, for her work in the Reagan Administration. She was a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York in 2006. The Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women named her Woman of the Year in 2015. Ms. McFarland is a board member of the American Conservative Union Foundation, a former board member of the Jamestown Foundation, and a distinguished advisor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She received a B.A. from George Washington University, M.A. from Oxford University, and completed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. program (all but dissertation) with concentrations on nuclear weapons, China, and the Soviet Union.
KT and her husband Alan McFarland have five children and nine grandchildren – so far.
