Robert O’Brien’s tenure as Donald Trump’s White House national security advisor was a difficult one, stemming from the fact that O’Brien didn’t seem to fully appreciate the precise nature of his responsibilities. The New York Times published a rather extraordinary report in early 2020, for example, noting that when O’Brien convened National Security Council meetings, he had a habit of starting the gatherings by distributing printouts of Trump’s latest tweets.
The Times’ report, which wasn’t independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the move amounted to “an implicit challenge” for those in attendance: Their job was to “find ways of justifying, enacting or explaining Mr. Trump’s policy, not to advise the president on what it should be.” For the better part of the last century, the White House National Security Council existed to offer presidents advice and information. In the Trump era, the model was flipped: O’Brien told NSC members what the then-president already believed and directed them to offer support for the positions Trump had already adopted. Four years later, the president-elect, for reasons unknown, decided that the United States should own Greenland, prompting O’Brien to do the same thing he did four years ago. The Hill reported: O’Brien got the ball rolling on Saturday with a thread published to social media, insisting that Trump is “100% right again,” this time about Greenland. “If our great ally Denmark can’t commit to defending the Island, the US will have to step in, as said,” he added. A day later, on Fox News, O’Brien went further. “ strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because, as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe even cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal,” he argued, suggesting that some Republicans only accept the reality of climate change when trying to expand the United States’ territorial boundarie