Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the incoming senior director of counter-terrorism and deputy assistant to the president for the Trump administration, said the second Trump White House would be significantly different from the last during a special Founders Roundtable on Breitbart Fight Club on Monday night.
Gorka, who served as a strategist for Trump during his first term, joined Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle for a more than hour-long discussion, where Gorka fielded questions from the editors and members of the Flight Club.
In one key analysis, Gorka detailed the differences between MAGA’s preparedness to govern from the executive branch in this incoming administration and Trump’s first term.
“Of the people in senior positions who knew what MAGA is and knew what they were doing, there were less than 20 of us,” Gorka said of the beginning of Trump’s first term. “In that 60 Minutes interview, I said we were a merry band of insurgents that took over the biggest bureaucracy in the world, and as such, we were vulnerable because A: our boss was a businessman from Manhattan who had no idea how absolutely evil the swamp was, and that people like his chief of staff, General Kelly, may have been Marine Corps generals, and it hurts me to say this because I love the Marines, and I spent two and a half years teaching them at Quantico, but they were evil seditionists.”
Gorka emphasized that “the forces of MAGA were small and were boxed out very rapidly.”
He pointed to Former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council Alex Vindman, who sparked the first Trump impeachment, and former Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley as examples of the opposition that Trump and MAGA allies in the White House were grappling with.
Gorka contends that “lessons have been learned,” pointing to Trump’s tapping of people for key positions this time around who he can trust and who will implement his agenda.
“Why is President Trump appointing Kash Patel, Alina Habba, me, Harmeet Dhillon? Why are we coming into the White House or the DOJ? Because he understands now that, you know, he was facing 700 years in prison because he is the greatest threat to the establishment because nobody owns him,” Gorka said.
“He’s not owned by the unions, he’s not owned by big pharma, he’s not owned by the defense military-industrial complex, and as a result, he must have people around him, not only who know what they’re doing, but people he can trust to implement the America First, MAGA agenda,” he continued.
While Gorka noted that the American people gave the Trump administration a mandate to implement his policies, he said, “It’s not going to be easy.”
“I mean, look at what’s happening with the putative confirmations of Cabinet members. The institutional Republicans are already trying to say, ‘No, the wishes of 77 million Americans don’t matter,'” Gorka told Marlow and Boyle. “And beyond that, I know right now, you know, the deep state is plotting against us, as they did way back when, with regards to how they can undermine us, how they’re running out the budgets right now so we won’t have any money in the White House to hire people because they’ll have spent it by January the 19th.”
Gorka emphasized that bureaucrats “run the government irrespective of who is president” and that Trump and his incoming administration are “an existential threat to the establishment.”
“It’s not going to be easy, but this is a very, very, very different White House from the one in 2017,” he added.
