RUTHFULLY YOURS

Recently departed Deputy Assistant to President Trump Dr. Sebastian Gorka appeared on Brian Kilmeade’s Fox News Radio program on Monday morning, August 28. Free to speak his mind now, he had a lot to say about his seven-month tenure working on foreign policy at the White House, what’s going on there now, and his plans for the future.

After former White House Chief Strategist Steven K. Bannon left his job on August 18, it was just a matter of time before Gorka. who reported to Bannon, followed suit. As a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor and prominent surrogate during the 2016 race, and during his tenure at the White House, Gorka stood out as a fierce and articulate defender of Donald J. Trump, regularly appearing on TV and challenging hostile hosts at CNN and MSNBC.

Gorka was born in London in 1970 to Hungarian parents and began his career as a foreign policy and anti-terrorism analyst in Hungary from 1992-2008. He has been an advisor on foreign policy, terrorism, and Islam to various U.S. academic and defense institutions and he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2012. He is the author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War (2016). His archived website from 2016 is here.

Gorka has been targeted by the Deep State media for his strong views that ran counter to the Obama Administration’s, and he has been labeled as a far-right ideologue and even a Nazi sympathizer. However, as the left’s slings and arrows continued even after he left the White House, a detailed defense of Gorka, “The political lynching of Sebastian Gorka” written by Michael Rubin, a self-admitted “Never Trumper,” was published on August 27 in the Washington Examiner and is recommended reading.

On Monday afternoon (August 28), Fox News emailed a news release with some of Gorka’s quotes from the interview that morning with Kilmeade. Commenting on his resignation (others insist he was fired), Gorka said:

The fact is I knew after the Afghan speech [by President Trump on August 21] that the anti-MAGA (Make America Great Again) forces were in ascendance. Not one mention of radical Islam in that speech that was written from the president. So last week I emailed General Kelly [White House Chief of Staff], I said I wanted to meet with him today on Monday because I will be resigning effective Friday, last Friday. I spoke to him on the telephone on Friday and said that I am resigning today and I reinforced that with an email. That’s how it happened because I realized I work for Steve Bannon, he’s gone and the wrong people are at the helm of policy issues. We will right that ship from the outside but for the time being the best I can do is to be effective as a private citizen.

Kilmeade asked Gorka what he thought of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s comments on Sunday that were interpreted as critical of or distancing himself from President Trump:

I’m a bit puzzled. I don’t expect counter terrorism expertise from a former oil industry mogul, but to say that the President speech on Afghanistan shouldn’t be about radical Islamic terrorism, it should be about all forms of terrorism. Brian, I would like to hear the Secretary tell me about all the animal rights terrorists or the White Supremacists terrorists that are coming out of the Hindu Kush or Tora Bora. I’m a little bit confused by what he said because it doesn’t make any sense.

As the Fox release put it, Gorka also commented “on reports of insubordination within the White House:”

There is a broader issue here a really serious one. The GOP thinks they won the election on November 8th and they are very, very mistaken in that. Donald Trump may have been the formal Republican candidate but he wasn’t the establishment’s candidate. He wiped the floor with all the establishment candidates who never took him seriously. You know who won the election, a real-estate mogul from New York called Donald J Trump. If the GOP thinks they won the election they will be sorely disappointed and they will pay the price come the next election. So, they need to wake up and smell the coffee grinds.   It’s the anti-establishment movement the people in America including the “Blue Collar” Democrats who said enough is enough; left and right have not served us well for at least 16 years. We are going to shake this town up and that is what the President is, he’s a fabulous disruptor and God bless him but the GOP needs to wake up to what happened in America on November 8th  because it’s not going to change, it’s going to get stronger.

That was it for the quotes provided by Fox News. When I listened to the 16-minute long recording of the interview, which is available here for streaming or downloading as an mp3 audio file, I noted some additional comments of interest.

Gorka said that he has not yet returned to work as an editor at Breitbart.com, where he contributed articles and served as an editor between 2014 and 2016. With Bannon having returned to his prior role there as executive chairman, it is assumed that Gorka will follow him. Gorka said he is still negotiating that. He noted he is involved with working on “several initiatives” – “new organizations” that will be formed to help advance Trump’s original MAGA agenda from the outside.

Donald Trump, Gorka said, is an “insurgent.” His inauguration on January 20, 2017 represented a “hostile takeover” – he probably should have said attempted takeover – of the Deep State government. At this point, Gorka said, “only four real believers” (in Trump’s MAGA agenda) remain in senior levels at the White House. He did not name them. Meanwhile, “we have lots of people in the White House who would have been comfortable working with Hillary Clinton.”

This comment deserves further exploration: “The Obama Administration played dirty and tried to sabotage” the incoming administration. Dr. Gorka’s final comment: “The ‘Fake News Industrial Complex’ is out of control.”

On Saturday August 26, Gorka gave a 17-minute interview to Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125. The interview can be streamed from this URL. Part of Gorka’s conversation with Breitbart Washington editor Matt Boyle was marred by a poor cell phone connection. Dr. Gorka managed to say that “We are winning and we will continue to do so. With Steve [Bannon] back at the helm [of Breitbart News], it’s like the last scene from Star Wars. Do you remember what Obi Wan Kenobi said to Darth [Vader]? ‘If you strike me down, I will be more powerful than you can ever imagine.’ The left thinks they’re winning. They have no idea what’s coming around the corner, and it’s going to be fun.”

Peter Barry Chowka is a widely published author and journalist. He writes most frequently these days for American Thinker.  His website is AltMedNews.net.  Follow Peter on Twitter.