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O’Brien himself has remained publicly silent on the subject. But his trip as a national security adviser included a list of early presidential primary slates, including Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada – an unusual combination for someone in his post. And one of O’Brien’s Republican friends said the trips had “amplified” his interest in running for president.
The gossip reflects the brewing skirmish as all those with a connection to Trump vie for supremacy after President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January. Trump himself has privately pondered a return to 2024, but many prominent figures in his orbit – everyone from Vice President Mike Pence to Donald Trump Jr. to Nikki Haley, the former US Ambassador to the Nations United – has been consistently touted as the next carrier GOP standard.
While Trump’s 2016 run showed that political neophytes like O’Brien can’t be completely left out of this conversation, the reality TV star at least had his fame to lean on. We don’t know what O’Brien’s angle would be.
“He’s not very well known – I don’t know of any geographic or ideological basis within the party,” said Michael Steel, former communications assistant to Jeb Bush, former Republican president of 2016, and former president of the Republican House, John Boehner. . “If he presents himself as the heir to President Trump’s national security legacy, I guess there will be other candidates like Vice President or former Ambassador Haley who would be better placed to do it. I just have no idea what his path would be.
“Being a foreigner is one thing. Presenting yourself as a stranger is much more difficult, ”added Doug Heye, former director of communications for the Republican National Committee. “What sets a person apart when they have no name identifier?” … In politics, we never say never, but we often say that it is extremely difficult to do.
Even some GOP strategists who know O’Brien are skeptical. “While his service is admirable, there are other personal traits that wouldn’t translate well in being president or winning a primary campaign,” said a GOP strategist who declined to speak officially so as not to hurt his relationship with O ‘Brien.
O’Brien declined to comment on the account of this report.
O’Brien, 54, is a lawyer by profession, but has long worked in Republican and national security circles. During the George W. Bush administration, he was appointed alternate representative to the UN. Later he co-chaired a State Department initiative. meant to use public-private partnerships to promote the rule of law in Afghanistan – a role he continued until the Obama era.
O’Brien has also immersed himself in presidential politics, serving as a foreign adviser to three Republican candidates – Mitt Romney in 2012, and Scott Walker and Ted Cruz in 2016.
In 2018, O’Brien joined the Trump administration as a special presidential envoy on hostage cases. While the president has strongly encouraged efforts to secure the release of Americans like Pastor Andrew Brunson in Turkey and rapper ASAP Rocky in Sweden, O’Brien has started to gain public attention. He was installed as Trump’s national security adviser the following year after John Bolton’s acrimonious split from the White House.
O’Brien brought a much lower profile to the National Security Council than his predecessors.
Unlike O’Brien, Bolton was a well-known foreign policy brand who had served in the Bush administration and was visible for years on Fox News. Prior to Bolton, HR McMaster had come to work as a noted military strategist who had led a cavalry force during the Iraq War and wrote a popular book criticizing the military handling of the Vietnam War. And Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was a name known for leading chants of “locking him up” at Trump’s campaign rallies and speaking out against former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.
O’Brien’s arrival was seen as an opportunity to bring in someone who would quietly support the President’s agenda – which he did.
He downsized the NSC and formed the Council’s focus on China. He has defended the president’s decisions to withdraw troops from military bases in places like Germany, an effort that many national security veterans have opposed. And he publicly backed the president’s controversial decision to kill Qassem Soleimani, the head of a powerful Iranian military division responsible for many of Tehran’s extrajudicial and covert military operations.
And he’s often given that support on television, where O’Brien is entrusted within the administration to appear on Sunday morning network news shows and popular cable shows to extol administration policies.
Yet O’Brien also used his perch to visit a number of critical states in the early stages of the presidential primaries. And in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election, O’Brien traveled to key states in the presidential swing like Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada, and Wisconsin, sparking discussions that aid national security was becoming too involved in the political process – territory traditionally off limits to current foreign policy makers.
There is evidence that O’Brien used these trips to improve his political knowledge. During a trip to Iowa in September to speak at Drake University, O’Brien asked a local political consultant to give him a “lay-of-the-land” briefing on the political situation in the country. State, according to the consultant.
During his travels, O’Brien has had various receptions, according to several people who attended or discussed his events.
The Republican friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe O’Brien’s travels, said the national security aide had met a few people who told him he “could be interesting in four years”. But the other appearances were just ho-hum. And during an October trip to Salt Lake City to speak at a symposium on global peace and stability, O’Brien turned off at least one attendee during a meeting with local religious leaders.
O’Brien, the most senior Mormon member of the Trump administration, called the meeting to discuss the administration’s work on religious freedom with local representatives from the Episcopal, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, Jewish and other congregations. Muslim.
But just as O’Brien began to assure the group that the president was committed to religious tolerance and that he was an ally of all religious communities, he was pushed back by Rabbi Sam Spector, who was attending the meeting. Spector recalled that he pressured O’Brien on how the Trump administration could claim the mantle of religious tolerance when the president lobbied to ban the United States from coming to the United States from many countries to majority Muslim and had repeatedly been slow to condemn white supremacy.
“He didn’t acknowledge any of my concerns and just started saying what I said was incorrect and a misrepresentation of the facts,” Spector said, describing O’Brien as stunned.
Internally, O’Brien has also been faced with the refusal of certain colleagues, including a whistleblower complaint of Yevgeny Vindman, senior NSC ethics official and twin brother of impeachment witness Alexander Vindman. The complaint alleged both misuse of government resources and “demoralizing sexist behavior” – claims the White House has vigorously denied.
Still, those around O’Brien insist he has behavior that could play well with voters, noting that he also has the benefit of being linked to Trump’s national security platform. , which is popular among the base of the president.
“I think he would campaign on American strength, strong families and communities, a strong economy and strong national security,” said the Republican friend, calling O’Brien “super sympathetic.”
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), who knows O’Brien well, argued that the national security adviser “would be a very serious candidate” and “a very credible candidate for the presidency” if he chose to enter.
“Robert O’Brien is one of the most powerful people in Washington, although he may not be as well known as he should be having his influence,” Lee said. “You don’t see his name very much on the front page of the newspaper, but every time you see his name, he’s attached to something very meaningful.”
O’Brien, his friends argue, could help bring the Republican Party into a new generation and pretend to be a political outsider, never having held office. And, perhaps most importantly, O’Brien can claim a good relationship with Trump, they added – a key distinction in any fight to take control of the GOP base.
“Trump loves O’Brien, and every other conversation that O’Brien comes in, he’s going to say, ‘This guy is fantastic and just got out of the central cast; he is beautiful, his wife is beautiful, ”said Lee.
National security advisers, however, do not have a long history of entering politics. Some, like Susan Rice, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Henry Kissinger, later rose to Cabinet positions or were launched as aspirants for the presidency or vice-presidency. But none made the jump to the presidential primary.
Heye, the Republican strategist, reiterated his doubts about O’Brien’s prospects of taking the leap.
“You have to have a compelling reason why you are running and why it should be you, as opposed to anyone else who is running,” he said.
Gabby Orr contributed to this report.
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