For just over a century, since America arrived as a major force on the global stage, we have feared that should our enemies defeat us, it would be on the battlefield or via a devastating nuclear onslaught. We never could have imagined that an enemy might take another approach altogether: infecting us with a presidential virus that is destroying our system from the top down.
It has happened to our justice system and to the balance of powers that is essential to how our democracy works. And this week, we have seen yet again how it is happening to the parts of our government responsible for protecting our national security.
In a single narrative spanning just a few days, we have seen yet again just how President Trump has, throughout his term of office, gutted our national security leadership structures like a fish and how devastating his actions have been. As we learned earlier this week, the president became angered when on Feb. 13, a senior official in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, Shelby Pierson, briefed the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Russian efforts were underway to again influence our elections and that again, the Russians were seeking to aid the Trump campaign. Trump lashed out at Pierson’s boss, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, furious that Democrats might use this intelligence against him politically. Maguire was fired and replaced, on a temporary basis, by U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell.
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Grenell has no intelligence experience to speak of. But that was not important to Trump. Grenell, a former flack for John Bolton during his brief, unhappy tenure as ambassador to the U.N., was seen as a Trump loyalist, a man who would put the needs of the president before those of the country. In one fell swoop, Trump continued his efforts to diminish the influence of the intelligence community and at the same time denigrated it by not actually asking Grenell to give up his ambassadorial job while taking on the massive job of overseeing the sprawling network of U.S. intelligence agencies worldwide.
By firing Maguire for having the temerity to allow the truth to be reported to Congress, Trump sent yet another signal that reporting the facts could be dangerous to your career health if you are a U.S. government official serving in this administration. That was illustrated with disturbing clarity this weekend when Trump’s fourth national security adviser, Robert O’Brien— like Grenell, the least experienced and least qualified person ever to hold the high office to which he was appointed—stated that he had not seen or heard of any evidence that Russia might be working again to help Trump. He was willing to acknowledge they might be helping Democrat Bernie Sanders, making a snide comment about Sanders’ 1988 honeymoon in Moscow, but he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that as national security adviser he had access to the best intelligence and he had seen no analysis to suggest the Russians were seeking to help Trump.
O’Brien dismissed reports of the intelligence briefing on the Hill as coming from “second-hand sources.” He said he has seen no back-up for the assertions that the Russians were intervening yet again. He completely sidestepped the fact that this week FBI Director Christopher Wray stated that such interventions were underway. He completely ignored the imperative that because the Russians interfered last time, preparing for another round of attacks and disinformation campaigns would be the minimum basic step any senior U.S. national security official should be undertaking. He pretended as though the intelligence community had not unanimously concluded the Russians intervened on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and that in last year’s threat assessment their leaders had not said they expected the same or worse in 2020.
O’Brien, like all Trump officials, was addressing an audience of one. Any sense of responsibility to protect U.S. national security was absent. Any grasp of facts that are clear to even the casual observer of recent events was missing. O’Brien, like all other Trump officials who survive, has made clear that he sees his job as to serve as a kind of human cocktail of drugs for the erratic president—part palliative, part sedative. His job is to keep the boss calm and happy, feeling good about himself and feeling good about O’Brien.
To do this, O’Brien has rejected the approach taken by past Trump national security advisers (and all prior national security advisers) of actually seeking to tell the president uncomfortable truths. This got his predecessor John Bolton (now dubbed a “traitor” by Trump for seeking to write the truth about his time at the president’s side) fired. It did the same for Bolton’s predecessor H.R. McMaster. O’Brien shows no sign of wanting to commit the fatal error of showing a hint of competence or independent thought.
O’Brien has even sought to institutionalize Trump’s desire to minimize any risk of getting expert advice by actively working to shrink the professional staff at the NSC to just 120 people (a fraction of its high during the Obama years). He, like Bolton, who also cut key capabilities at the NSC like those dealing with cyberthreats or the climate crisis, has also reduced the number of NSC meetings that take place to coordinate inter-agency policy formation, planning and execution. He has also overseen the public and indefensible firings of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny Vindman for having committed the unforgivable sins of, in Alexander’s case, speaking the truth in public about presidential wrong-doing and, in Yevgeny’s case, of having been Alexander’s brother.
The NSC is the brain of the national security apparatus. Trump and O’Brien are giving it a lobotomy.
The O’Brien formula—placating Trump at all costs, denying the facts, and gutting the institution he was charged with running—is one we have seen elsewhere in the Trump national security team. This week, in another development, we saw the new White House director of personnel Johnny McEntee call in representatives of key cabinet agencies and instruct them to identify political appointees who might be insufficiently loyal to Trump or members of the “deep state.”
Also this week, the deputy secretary of defense for policy, John Rood, resigned after having run afoul of the White House for expressing discomfort with Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine. The Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community and the FBI, all key to U.S. national security, have seen heads roll and others forced out the door who did not want to comply with Trumpist loyalty oaths and orders that might compromise their higher duty to the Constitution or the country. At the State Department, Secretary Mike Pompeo has also overseen both an exodus and a purge of valued foreign service officers like Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch while maintaining a set of O’Brien and Grenell-like priorities that resulted in his being accused in a New Yorker profile of being like “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”
As former Admiral William McRaven, one of the Navy’s most respected officers of the past several decades, wrote this week, as a consequence of this kind of behavior—and he was speaking specifically of the firing of Maguire—“We should be deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security, there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.” (For a similar warning about the state of our judiciary, see this article on the extraordinary, scorching dissent condemning judicial pro-Trump partisanship from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Firing people like Maguire or Vindman or Yovanovitch or promoting loyalist hacks like O’Brien or Grenell or Pompeo not only changes the character of institutions vital to our security, it also sends a perverse and dangerous message to the rest of the government and to the world.
The virus is taking its toll. Our body politic is in critical condition. The warnings of patriots and heroes like McRaven and Sotomayor must be heeded. The consequences of each of the seemingly small developments of a week like this one—the firing of Maguire, the hiring of Grenell, the statements of O’Brien, the departure of Rood, the mission of McEntee—must be taken together as part of something much larger, more dangerous and, unless they are reversed, as part of an affliction that may prove fatal to that which we should cherish and value most in our system.
David Rothkopf is the author of two major histories of the National Security Council, Running the World and National Insecurity, and is now working on his third book in the series, covering the Obama and Trump administrations.
