Donald Trump’s selection of the far-right commentator Sebastian Gorka for a senior national security post has prompted outrage and ridicule over a pick that seems extreme even amid a stream of nominations of conspiracy theorists, alleged sex traffickers, TV hosts and repeaters of Russian state propaganda.
Last week, Trump named Gorka deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counter-terrorism. Unlike top national security picks – Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense – the position is not subject to Senate confirmation.
Trump said Gorka was a “legal immigrant” with “more than 30 years of national security experience”, including chairs and fellowships at major institutions.
But John Bolton, the former UN ambassador who was Trump’s third national security adviser in his first term, told CNN that Gorka was “a conman” who should not be “in any US government” and whose selection does not “bode well for counter-terrorism efforts”.
Bolton’s predecessor as national security adviser, former army general HR McMaster, told CBS Gorka was not a good pick and added: “I think that the president, others who are working with him, will probably determine that pretty quickly, soon after he gets into that job.”
Current Trump advisers were reportedly horrified. An unnamed “person close to [Trump’s] national security team” told the Washington Post: “Almost universally, the entire team considers Gorka a clown. They are dreading working with him.”
Michael Anton, a conservative writer who served in the first Trump administration, reportedly removed himself from consideration for deputy national security adviser, in protest at Gorka’s selection.
Observers predicted Gorka’s stay in the second Trump White House would prove as brief as his stay in the first. Then, Gorka lasted seven months as a national security strategist before being shown the door by then chief of staff John Kelly, amid reports that Gorka failed to gain security clearance. His exit followed that of his far-right ally and mentor Steve Bannon, for whom he once worked at Breitbart News.
Even in so short a stay, Gorka attracted controversy aplenty. Backing extreme policies including banning people from predominantly Islamic nations entering the US, Gorka told the Washington Post he “completely jettison[ed]” traditional, “nuanced and complicated” approaches to combating terrorist threats.
“Anybody who downplays the role of religious ideology … they are deleting reality to fit their own world,” Gorka said.
Cindy Storer, a former CIA analyst “who developed the agency models that trace the path from religious zealotry to violence”, told the Post that Gorka “thinks the government and intelligence agencies don’t know anything about radicalization, but the government knows a lot and thinks he’s nuts”.
Gorka has spoken of his own religion in militaristic terms, including saying he and fellow Christian rightwingers are “not the lambs of the Bible; that is Jesus, our savior. We turn over the tables of the moneylenders. We are there when he calls, ‘Sell everything you own and buy a sword.’”
Last year, when Hamas attacked Israel, Gorka offered Israel advice: “Kill every single one of them. God bless Israel. God bless Judeo-Christian civilization.”
Gorka has also attracted attention with flamboyant behavior. On 20 January 2017, he attended Trump’s inaugural celebrations wearing a military tunic and a medal bestowed by Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian nationalist group.
Boasting to Fox News that “the alpha males are back”, he said he wore the medal in tribute to his father, who fled Hungary for London in the 1950s, escaping the communist takeover. Critics pointed to the group’s ties to the Nazis during the second world war. Gorka denied accusations of antisemitism, as did modern-day members of Vitézi Rend.
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Out of office, Gorka contributed to Fox News and Newsmax and hosted a radio show for Salem. In 2019, as Trump sought revenge for the investigation of Russian election interference, Gorka posted a video in which he announced, to much mockery, “the kraken has been unleashed”. In 2021, he was banned from YouTube for championing Trump’s election fraud lie.
Gorka also attracted ridicule by recording a video ad for Relief Factor, a fish oil supplement he claimed made him “pain free” after lower-back problems. The ad billed him as Dr Sebastian Gorka. Critics pointed out Gorka is not a medical doctor. His subject is political science. The value of his PhD, from Corvinus University in Budapest, is widely questioned.
Nonetheless, Gorka has retained a place in the rightwing firmament, even through legal troubles including a 2016 misdemeanor charge for taking a pistol through security at a Washington airport, and the news that while he was in the first Trump White House, a gun-related warrant for his arrest remained open in Hungary.
Gorka denied wrongdoing. Both cases were dropped.
A regular at events like CPAC, the annual Maryland gathering of the rightwing clans, Gorka returned to Trump world before the 2020 election, as a member of the National Security Education Board. This year, he helped with debate preparation. His wife, Katharine Gorka, also worked for Trump, as an adviser in the Department of Homeland Security.
News of Gorka’s new White House job prompted continuing alarm.
Charles P Pierce, a columnist for Esquire, wrote: “Out of what seems to be the endless parade of whackadoos, smackbrains, rockheads, fanatics, lunatics, and general shit-for-brains that has been following El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago [Trump] ever since he rode down the escalator [at Trump Tower in 2015] and sent the American idea of self-government on an express escalator to hell, none have been more ridiculous than ‘Doctor’ Sebastian Gorka.”
Alex Floyd, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, called Gorka “a far-right extremist who is as dangerous as he is unqualified to lead America’s counter-terrorism strategy”.
Bolton said: “Obviously, everybody is now focusing on the top jobs. But the questions of who are the deputy secretaries, who are the undersecretaries, and so on, is also going to tell us a lot about who’s actually running the government.”
