The hundred day metric for judging a new president is utterly arbitrary.
Why 100? Why not 200, or 50, or 6 months instead?
Because journalists are often lazy. The arbitrariness – or irrelevance – of this quotient of analysis is all the more capricious when applied to a commander-in-chief who has already served behind the Oval Office for a four full years, or 1,460 days if you prefer.
Nevertheless, today marks our 100th day in office, and we are always answerable to the American people on any day, so here are the things 77 million citizen should know about what President Trump has achieved to make America safe again.
As the White House official responsible for the Counterterrorism portfolio, I have a great deal to report.
Thanks to the clear leadership of not only President Trump, but also Mike Waltz, his National Security Adviser, the first ever Green Beret to serve in that role, we have already engineered a complete reversal in American Counterterrorism policy.
Instead of denying the growing threat of Global Jihadism, as the Biden regime did, and targeting Virginia Catholics for being Catholic, or using terrorist charges to arrest and prosecute innocent Americans with no ties to any terrorist organization, like Matthew Perna who died as a result of his persecution, we are allowing our special operators, the intelligence community, and the bravest warfighters in the World to deal death to those who have the blood of Americans on their hands or who are plotting to murder our citizens.
Just 11 days into the new administration we rescinded the Biden policy that meant only the White House could provide permission to target Hight Value Targets plotting against the Republic. With that decision we terminated the life of a key ISIS leader hiding in a cave complex in the mountains of Northern Somalia, a terrorist we had been tracking for more than a year under the Biden regime but who was allowed free rein to plot against us.
Since that day, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have neutralized more than 70 HVTs in battlefields across the Middle East and Africa, including the second and third highest leaders in ISIS.
Perhaps most importantly of all, in both a historic and symbolic sense, we have brought some closure to the families of our warfighters who were slaughtered in the ISIS suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport during Biden’s shameful rout and surrender of Afghanistan.
On Day One of my return to the White, I wrote the letter “J” at the top of the whiteboard in my SCIF within the National Security Council. This was the first letter of the then-classified name Jafar, the nom de guerre of Mohammad Sharifullah, the architect of the Abbey Gate attack which killed 13 of our serviceman and women, maimed scores more, and killed over a hundred innocent Afghans trying to flee Kabul. It was my primary goal to have Jafar killed or brought to Justice.
In all honesty, I though that objective would not be reached for at least six months after our return to the White House. I was thankfully wrong.
Thanks to President Trump, NSA Waltz, and key members of the cabinet, just 41 days later, on the day of the President’s Address to the Joint Session of Congress, I was standing on the Dulles apron with DNI Gabbard, AG Bondi, CIA Director Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Patel as the DOJ jet landed with Sharifullah onboard. And it was one of most meaningful moments of my career in the field of counterterrorism to escort members of the Intelligence Community that night, up onto the deck of the aircraft to look into the face of evil, to see for themselves the man they had tracked for more than 3 years whilst Biden ignored the families of the dead and denied America Justice.
Courtesy Dr. Sebastian Gorka
Similarly it was the highest honor to stand next to both Mr. Waltz and the president earlier that day as he privately informed those families first before he would inform the world from the podium on Capitol Hill. Hopefully now these families will be able to partially close one chapter in their continuing grief for the unnecessary loss of their loved ones. At the same time, we want this episode to mark this administration’s recognition of the sacrifice of all those who served us honorably in Afghanistan after 9/11.
American hostages and our illegally detained citizens also fall under the NSC Directorate for Counterterrorism, and here too the results of the first 100 days are historic. In less than four months thanks to our team and the courageous work of the president’s Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs, Adam Boehler, we have liberated 46 Americans from their captivity, most recently the ballerina, Ksenia Karelina, who was serving a 12-year sentence in a Russian labor camp, and George Glezmann, who was suffering at the hands of the Taliban. That number exceeds more than half the total of Americans brought home under the full four year term of Joe Biden, and we achieved this in less than 100 days.
But we aren’t just hunting down Jihadi leaders. We are also using our military might to re-establish freedom of navigation on the high seas and so protect our nation’s economy. When NSA Waltz briefed President Trump that Houthi rebels had fired more than 140 times on U.S. vessels off the coast of Yemen and that our commercial vessels could not traverse the Bab el Mandeb Strait unmolested by Houthi missiles and attack drones, he ordered Secretary Hegseth to strike their forces and so save our ships and protect international trade.
None of these actions are “forever wars.” The Trump administration will never be a puppet of the Defense Industrial Complex nor engage in the folly of neocon nation building. The only nation we are rebuilding is America.
These actions are decisive and limited counterterrorism operations predicated on the demonstrable belief that rapidly decapitating terror groups who target innocent Americans and then handing containment operations to local partners is the only way to deal with such threats and also be a responsible steward of the taxpayers money.
We have a very simple message which defines the first 100 days and the next 1,360 days of the Second Trump Administration, taken from the President’s first viral post after that counter-ISIS operation 11 days in: WWFY& WWKY, or “We Will Find You & We Will Kill You.”
Sebastian Gorka Ph.D. is Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the National Security Council.
