Former Deputy Adviser to the President Dr. Sebastian Gorka discussed his exit from the White House with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily.
Gorka said the simple version of the reason he resigned is that “people like myself, people like Steve Bannon, came into the building because of a very clear agenda, which was the MAGA agenda, Make America Great Again — and, in the last seven months, we’ve seen people who really had nothing to do with MAGA, who weren’t affiliated with the campaign, rise in influence inside the building.”
“The issues that I was brought in to deal with — national security, counterterrorism specifically — weren’t heading in the right direction,” he lamented.
Gorka said the last straw was “the speech written for the president on Afghanistan last week when I realized the best I can do to support the president is from the outside.”
“When you have one of the most important national security speeches in his early tenure not mention the key phrase ‘radical Islam’ or ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ then we have to take the game to the outside. So we’re starting MAGA Phase Two, and people like Steve and myself have a whole slew of tools — I was going to say ‘weapons,’ but let’s say tools, that’s a ‘basket full of tools’ for our fellow deplorables — that we can use on the outside to support the president and keep the MAGA train running on its rails,” Gorka said, riffing on Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” comment from the 2016 presidential campaign.
Gorka explained why he thought he could be more effective on President Trump’s behalf outside the White House.
“Let me give you an example: I came in to do national security work for Steve, a chief strategist, as a deputy to the president, but after the first executive order on the moratorium for travel into the United States, I was thrown into representing the White House in the media,” he recalled. “Every time I went on media, somebody else had to approve it. Somebody else had to write my talking points. Somebody else kept that relationship with the individual who was booking me to themselves.”
“We have a great team inside the White House, but I can do whatever I like,” he said happily. “I think I broke a personal record on Monday. I think I did about 30 media hits. That’s how you make the MAGA agenda happen: get the message out there, reassure the base, and make sure that the Swamp does not control the narrative. Just media alone, it’s incredibly liberating not to be a government employee.”
Gorka hoped President Trump would feel liberated in the same way and follow his instincts as a communicator.
“I completely subscribe to the philosophy: Let Donald Trump be Donald Trump,” Gorka declared. “Look, he reached out to me the day after I resigned, and his message to me was very simple: ‘Thank you for your support. I’m going to stay on the agenda. Can you help me from the outside as you did on the inside?’ My message back was, ‘Absolutely. That’s why I did what I did, so I can be more effective.’”
He offered another example of the White House communications environment: “Do you remember the Jim Acosta/Steven Miller moment? For me, that was MAGA because you had somebody who loved America, knew what he was talking about 101 percent — it’s like going to a gunfight with a knife, going up against Steven Miller on immigration, you just don’t do it, right? And in that three-minute interchange, you saw why the president won. You saw this elitist bubble attitude: ‘Well, only Australians and English people speak English, so what are you saying to all the other immigrants?’ I mean, it was the Swamp incarnate.”
Gorka recalled White House staffers cheering as they watched the exchange, but later there were “voices afterward for days inside the building saying ‘how embarrassing, what did he do with Jim Acosta?’”
“No, that’s how you treat people who think that the press briefing in the White House is a CNN event,” he declared. “No, Jim Acosta, it’s not the Jim Acosta briefing. It is the presidential press spokesman’s briefing. That’s what we have to get out of the building, this idea that we are here to please the elite.”
“Donald J. Trump was the consummate insurgent outsider. He was as much an anti-right wing establishment candidate as he was an anti-Democrat. That’s what we have to reinforce, and that’s what the GOP has to understand. I’m going to be doing everything in my power to make sure that the establishment doesn’t win,” he promised.
Gorka modulated his criticism of establishment voices in the White House by saying he doesn’t want to “create more palace intrigue.”
“I was at the brunt of enough of that,” he noted ruefully.
“There are some amazing people there,” he added. “Kellyanne: hero. Sarah Huckabee Sanders: what she has done to the media to put them in their place is superb. She’s a happy warrior. But there definitely are these two different worldviews, that we are there to please the Fake News-industrial complex, and people like myself, people like Steven Miller, like Sarah, like Kellyanne, who say no. They are morally bankrupt — not just financially bankrupt — and we are not here to please them.”
Gorka: China Is ‘Executing Economic Warfare Against Us Right Now’
Gorka recommended strong support for President Trump on three key national security issues. “Number One, it’s ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ okay?” he began. “I don’t care where you served in the military, or how many stars you’ve got on your shoulder, it’s not a bunch of criminals. It is people committed to a radical ideology that is totalitarian and wishes to destroy Western civilization, the Judeo-Christian heritage. That’s all you need to know. The president has said this in front of Congress, in Riyadh, in Warsaw. We need to support him in that.”
“Secondly, the JCPOA deal cannot be reaffirmed,” he continued, using the official name of the Iran nuclear deal. “There is no reaccrediting, no clearance of it on the next phase, because it is dangerous. It facilitates Iran. It must not go through for a third time.”
He said the deal “gave billions of dollars to Iran” but “did not stop them acquiring nuclear capability, just kind of slowed them.”
“I was in the room with Steve, with the president, with Rex Tillerson, with H.R. McMaster, with Mnuchin, and I can tell you the president was on our side. He was on Steve’s side and my side,” Gorka reported.
“We’re going to be doing some stuff on the outside that will make it very difficult, if not nigh-impossible, for those who wish to maintain the establishment view of the JCPOA, the Iran deal, to push it through a third time,” he vowed.
“And then lastly, I have to say I owe a debt of gratitude to Steve for educating me in the last eight months on one issue. He’s hardcore on the Islamic jihadi threat. So am I. That’s what I built my reputation on. But when it comes to the long-term threat to America, it’s China,” Gorka said.
“The launch of the 1301 investigation on the theft of intellectual property by Chinese state concerns is an incredibly good start. We must continue to apply pressure to China. As such, we’re going to do some things on the outside to educate the people of America, to make sure the Hill goes in the right direction, and to make sure that China no longer threatens us economically,” he said.
“ISIS will be dealt with. We will crush it. To quote a first-tier operator, a Tier One operator who spoke to me recently about what we’re doing in Iraq and Syria, we are stacking them like cordwood. They will be obliterated. Other nations like Russia, not a problem. Spoilers: they’re stirring, they’re exploiting the lack of leadership for the last eight years, but not a direct threat existentially to the United States. If you look at who has a plan outside of Iran, to dominate in all aspects, it’s China,” he explained.
Gorka recommended listeners research China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, also known as the “New Silk Road” project, to get a sense of Chinese plans for “hegemonic dominance in all areas, especially economic.”
“They are executing economic warfare against us right now,” he warned. “That is our long-term threat, and that is what we’re going to help support. The president has seen the light. We gave him some classified briefings on China. He now realizes how massive this issue is. We’re going to support him from the outside.”
Gorka said there are “some great people out there who know what they’re talking about and haven’t bought into the Silicon Valley-Big Business, ‘Hey, it’s such a great market, we’ve got to work with them’” mindset.
“Washington, the Hill, Big Business — especially IT and others — have said, ‘Well, we can’t do anything about it, and we need access to those markets.’ Wrong. Read people like Michael Pilsbury. Look at the books by Peter Navarro. They understand one thing: China sees itself as a culture, as a civilization, that is millennia old, and they look at the last hundred years as a blip. They see the last hundred years as them being embarrassed by the West, and they are coming back,” Gorka warned.
He added that he would leave it to expert Sinologists to determine whether China’s belief in its historic economic power is entirely accurate, but the important point is that a comparison of current purchasing parity power between China and the United States is not favorable to America.
“I don’t want to scare anybody, but the Chinese economy is bigger than America’s,” he pointed out.
Marlow turned to Afghanistan, citing the Pentagon’s embarrassing admission that troop levels in that country are almost 50 percent higher the American people were led to believe as evidence that we are being asked to support policy changes without honest and accurate information from our government.
“We had some amazing meetings in the Situation Room with the president and his principal Cabinet members, also in the tank in the Pentagon and Afghanistan, before I left, before Steve left,” Gorka recalled. “The president was masterful because he addressed exactly these issues. He asked the key questions: ‘What assumptions are you working on?’ He was given these briefing packets, these PowerPoints. When you read time and time again assumptions, open-source assumptions, the ‘federal government of Afghanistan’ — we asked the question, ‘What federal government of Afghanistan?’”
“We’ve inherited 16 years of bad thinking, and the president sees through it,” he said. “Those who can support him to give him the right policy options have moved outside the building, but we’re going to provide the right policy options from our new perches with far greater freedom.”
“The president still gets it,” Gorka asserted. “He was very unhappy with everything. We had seven meetings on Afghanistan at the level of principals that were rehashing the old, worn-out, retread policies of the last 16 years, and the president was not satisfied. We opened the door to people who know what they’re talking about and know how much the cost to America is. That’s what we’re going to continue to support in the future.”
Gorka said it was vital to maintain pressure from outlets like Breitbart News to “counter the mainstream media’s narrative on what has been achieved as part of MAGA.”
“We’re going to win. This is about the long game,” he predicted with confidence. “Look at illegal migration. Look at the economy. What are we, on the 27th record for the U.S. economy and the stock market since January the 20th? Look at everything else that’s happened.”
“Don’t get lost in the miasma of the Fake News-industrial complex,” he advised. “Talk about the reality and use that as ammunition to support the MAGA agenda.”
In response to a caller glum about the prospects of President Trump being diverted from his agenda by advisers who don’t believe in it, Gorka cited Trump’s background as the son of a small businessman to argue that he remains determined to see it through.
“That’s what formed Donald Trump’s understanding of America. He didn’t go from the Ivy League to Goldman Sachs. He watched his father build homes for fellow Americans. As a result, the man who matters the most gets it, and he will make sure that you and other business people in America who are the backbone of our economy will be protected and will be allowed to thrive,” he assured the caller.
“It’s about prosperity for the president, prosperity for all of us,” Gorka said.
He agreed with another caller’s contention that the Trump administration has a major problem with leaked information, including leaks of Gorka’s own departure from the White House.
“Every administration at the highest level has leaks to the press on tactical issues with somebody you don’t like,” Gorka reflected. “But when it comes to 125 national security leaks, 62 of which Congress has deemed to be very serious — we have a sevenfold increase in the number of leaks during the Obama administration or during the Bush administration.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re unveiling national security secrets as a government employee, that’s treasonous, and the full weight of the law should be used against you,” he declared. “You should be frog-marched, perp-walked, out of the Eisenhower building, stand in an orange jumpsuit, and be prosecuted if you’re leaking national security information.”
“The idea that the president, the most powerful man in the world, can’t have a private phone call with another head of state is scandalous. That’s the Permanent State, that’s the modern mainstream media,” Gorka added.
Gorka agreed with a final caller’s contention that the United States would currently be at war with Syria if Hillary Clinton had become president.
“Don’t mention it. We’re just here trying to do some good,” he said to the caller’s opinion that he, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump were “heroes” for avoiding war in Syria. “The President of the United States was clear during the campaign and hasn’t changed. The idea that we go and invade other people’s countries to change them is fundamentally un-American.”
“We have lost thousands of lives in the last 16 years, spent trillions of dollars. To what gain? What has it done for the average American?” Gorka asked.
He said President Trump is “very clear-eyed on this.”
“He constantly pushes back. Syria is not ours to solve. We will help people, but it is not ours to put American boots on the ground,” Gorka said.
SiriusXM host Alex Marlow elicited a groan from Gorka by running through some examples of the “Fake News-industrial complex” and mentioning Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who seems to enjoy much more contact with President Trump than friendlier media outlets.
“Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, people who have actually called themselves ‘hacks’ in internal emails to Podesta. That’s all you need to know,” Gorka said, referring to emails exposed by WikiLeaks. Marlow said this reinforced his point that too many people inside the White House seem invested in a losing battle to win the approval of hostile media.
Trump Has Best Instincts, but Obama Holdovers Are ‘Massive Problem’
“Can we go beyond media, and go to really the massive big picture?” Gorka asked. “Because people have to understand what happened in the last eight months. Our listeners understand this, but I’m reiterating it to reassure everybody that we are in this for the long game. We’re talking about eight years, not eight months — this is about the long game. This is bureaucratic warfare. This is indirect warfare. This is political warfare.”t is, on November the 8th, what happened? It’s like, it’s literally Red Dawn. It’s a scrappy bunch of insurgents, the wolverines won against the establishment,” he said. “The GOP thought that President Trump was their candidate. No, only formally, only on paper. He had nothing to do with the Swamp. He won because he was the antithesis of the Swamp. So a small band of scrappy men and women won the election as an insurgency.”
“Then what happens a few months later on January the 20th? It’s a hostile takeover. The federal government is millions of employees. You add the armed forces, literally, it is millions of employees. In come a few people who believe in the agenda, who fought for the agenda, who put their careers on the line for the agenda. And then what happens? We have to take over government. And then suddenly we see the sea pitch of individuals into the building,” he said.
“Tucker Carlson nailed it. I don’t think Tucker Carlson is a huge fan of Breitbart or Steve Bannon, but when he did his segment after Steve left, he said, ‘Whatever you think about Steve Bannon, he would not have been at home in a Hillary Clinton White House.’ The fact is, we had people fill the building who not only would have been at home in a Hillary Clinton White House, who actually, some of them — you know who I’m talking about — would have had Cabinet positions in a Hillary Clinton White House,” Gorka told Marlow.
Gorka said excessive concern about Clinton-friendly staff in the Trump administration was unwarranted, however.
“I have never met anybody who has the accuracy of instinct that Donald J. Trump has. He has a preternatural — he’s a supernatural instinct to act. You take him a pallet of decisions, he may not have read the Peloponnesian Wars or the latest article by a peer-reviewed journal, but he’ll look at those options, he’ll choose one of them, and you know what? 98 percent of the time, it’s the right option. He’s just an instinctual actor,” said Gorka.
“I know right now that that instinct is going to serve him very well in the coming months, and he’s going to realize who around him are not serving him with the best advice,” he anticipated.
“I’m not saying Steve or myself are going back in the building, but I assure you, the people you are most worried about, the MAGA crowd are most worried about, will be leaving the White House sooner or later, and other individuals associated with the original platform will be coming back,” he added.
“Look at Dave Bossie. Look at Corey Lewandowski. They were around the West Wing all the time. Did they work for the U.S. government? No. Were they there to drink cappuccinos in the Eisenhower cafeteria? No. They were in the Oval Office. So the president reaches out and he’s loyal,” Gorka declared.
A caller asked Gorka for an up-to-date definition of the “right wing,” which has become heavily factionalized.
“I don’t think there’s a neat, discretely-defined entity out there that it is,” he replied. “It’s the people. It’s the blue-collar workers of the Steel Valley who voted for a billionaire from New York. That’s who it is. It’s the people who are not ashamed of America, but the people who believe in America. It’s the people who think, ‘Why should jobs go to China? Is that what globalization means for me and my family?’”
“I hate it, I absolutely detest it, when people force us into using lazy labels — neoliberals, neocon, the Manhattan set, the whatever. No, it’s Americans who believe in America,” he contended. “If you’re part of that description, that’s who we’re talking about.”
Gorka said a great deal has happened in the few days since he left the White House, prompting him to keep a heavy schedule of media appearances as a commentator.
“The media environment is going to change in the very near future,” he predicted. “I know Steve is plotting, I know Steve is talking to a lot of people. The PAC world is abuzz, so you will see some interesting things happen in the PACs.”
“We had eight months of kind of somnambulance, a kind of lurching to the snooze button in the PAC world. It was very disconcerting on the inside to see a lot of talk and not a lot happening to support the agenda from the outside,” he elaborated. “I think that’s going to change very rapidly. One of the key catalysts of that is tax reform. A lot of people are worried.”
Marlow commended President Trump for doing a good job of presenting tax reform to the public on Wednesday.
“The president did absolutely what had to be done,” Gorka agreed. “But if you look at what the Hill’s done, I wouldn’t label it as the Manhattan set or the Goldman Sachs set — it’s unworkable is what it is. It’s like the solution to Obamacare: it’s not a solution. It’s as bad as what we already have. It’s just unworkable, it’s overcomplicated. Talk to Stephen Moore, talk to Larry Kudlow. In fact, if you look at the deductions, if you look at the way it’s currently worded with regards to real estate factoring into your tax deductions, it’s a disaster for small businesses.”
“We need to continue unleashing the economy, and part of that isn’t the massive corporations. The key to that are the small to medium-sized businesses,” he urged, anticipating movement toward “reforming the tax reform package to be sensible and to serve those it should serve the most, which is small to medium-sized businesses and individual U.S. taxpayers.”
A caller from Canada expressed dismay at how many believers in the MAGA agenda hired by President Trump have been fired by subordinates like National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and said he fears the “Deep State” remains powerful enough to block the president.
“I don’t like the phrase ‘Deep State’ because I don’t like conspiracy theories,” Gorka said in response. “I have a whole bookshelf of them at home, but I use them as entertainment. I prefer the phrase ‘Permanent State.’”
“I’ll give you an example of my experience, two things I learned in the last eight months,” he offered. “I thought I was adequately cynical about the media in America. I had no idea. The fact that the mainstream media would not only lie about me and my colleagues, but would come after my dead mother, my wife, and my teenage son was when the scales fell off my eyes. There is no moral compass. There are people, many thousands of people in this country who call themselves journalists, who have no moral compass. That’s Number One.”
“Secondly, with regard to the obstacles inside the administration, I wasn’t a member of the NSC. I worked for Steve. But I was invited to key meetings of the NSC, especially on Iraq, Syria, the Qatar crisis, etc. To sit in a Situation Room with all the out stations from the government – DIA, CIA, State, the Pentagon, embassies, and et cetera — on a key issue of import to the president for 90 minutes and repeatedly not hear anyone mention who the president is, and what he wants, and what he said yesterday in Warsaw, or Riyadh, or Houston, or wherever, was shocking to me,” he recalled.
Gorka said it fell to him as a political appointee to speak up in those meetings and ask, “Hey, guys, do you remember why we have this meeting, and what the president said about Qatar yesterday?”
“That told me that we have thousands of people who pick up a government paycheck funded by you, funded by me, who think they know better than the person who was chosen to lead the country. That’s the Permanent State for me, and that’s what we’ve got to fight back,” he said.
Gorka and Marlow shared a laugh at Politico suggesting “Obama holdovers” in the Trump administration should be christened “patriots” instead.
“Yes, if your definition of ‘patriot’ means somebody who doesn’t want to obey the Commander-in-Chief and leaks daily to the press,” Gorka said sarcastically. “That’s Newspeak. That’s George Orwell.”
Gorka said Obama holdovers remain a “massive problem, a huge problem.”
“There was an Obama holdover who, to a senior director of the NSC in the first three months — before even H.R. came on — called me and another individual ‘the ideologues that are the problem inside the building’ to his boss,” he said. “Think about that for a second. A civil servant from another agency who feels confident enough to tell his politically appointed superior about somebody who’s a deputy assistant, and feels he will have no consequences to that action. It’s really shocking.”
“To the point you’ve raised: there is a concerted effort, and that’s why it’s so great to be on the outside, to push back,” he told Marlow. “Just follow Ben Rhodes’ Twitter feed. Follow Colin Kahl. These are the guys who tweet in the morning, that meme, that theme will be spun out in 20 articles in the next 12 hours on Politico, on Buzzfeed, on HuffPo. They are here to — as former Obama officials from the outside — to undermine this administration with their buddies still in the building.”
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