Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s former aide and staunch defender, argues the 2024 election hinges on Republicans taking Congress to block fraud and stop Biden’s policies—inflation, open borders, and threats from China/Russia. He dismisses Trump’s divisive rhetoric as secondary to existential stakes, blaming COVID-era mail-in ballots for his 2020 loss while praising his record: judicial picks, economic gains for minorities, and the First Step Act. Though he criticizes Georgia’s chaotic post-election push, Gorka insists only Trump can mobilize the base, framing his combativeness as a weapon against the "deep state." The episode ends with a sharp contrast: Gorka’s unshakable faith in Trump’s adaptability versus skepticism over whether his style will cost Republicans the election. [Automatically generated summary]
So we're talking about the future of the Republican Party and whether Donald Trump is that future or is he the past or is he a suggestion, the ghost of the future.
And I wanted to talk to Sebastian Gorka for a lot of reasons.
One, I just like talking to Sebastian Gorka.
He was the deputy assistant for strategy for Donald Trump.
He's the host of America First on Salem Radio Network and the Gorkha Reality Check on Newsmax.
And you can now find him on gorka.locals.com.
He is not just a great guy.
He is also a Trump loyalist who is an honest man.
So he always tells me what he thinks, but he tries, he always comes down on Trump's side.
So I want to talk to him about that.
And I also want to talk to him because we share, our goals are almost identical.
We both love the West.
We love this country.
We love our God.
And we would like to see all of them elevated.
And our only question, the only difference between us is methods.
So Sebastian, great to see you.
Hang on.
We also like cigars.
And we like cigars.
Oh, there's so many other things.
We like cigars.
We do.
We have so much in common, but I'm dubious.
I'm dubious about the future of Trump.
You have told me, and you've said this on the air, so I'm not revealing anything, that you are absolutely certain Trump is going to run and you think he'll win.
Is that fair?
So I'm absolutely convinced he's going to run.
Last time I saw him in Trump Tower in New York, it was clear without a shadow of a doubt.
Everything he said since then publicly reinforces that.
The only potential flying the ointment, Andrew, could be if we don't crush the Democrats in the midterm, because there's no point him running if we don't control both the Senate and the House, because you know what's going to happen day one.
You know, Nancy or whoever replaces Nancy is going to start impeachment number three, and there'll be 100 impeachments to follow.
So we have to crush the Democrats in the midterms.
Then he is going to run.
And if the local state legislatures do their due diligence in the next two years and prevent as much election fraud as possible, he will stroll back into the White House because there is nobody.
Ron DeSantis is doing great in Florida, but there is nobody.
Absolutely.
Even Kissinger has said this, who's not a massive Trump fan.
There's nobody, nobody since Roosevelt who can announce a rally in 24 hours' time and then fill a stadium with 60,000 people.
That kind of momentum means that he is not only the kingmaker for conservatives, he's also the person who will be the next nominee for president.
So there was just a poll in the Wall Street Journal, and this is a new polling system they've got, which has one of Trump's pollsters on it, and it also has one of Biden's pollsters.
Seemed to me a pretty straightforward poll.
It shows that Joe Biden is immense.
I mean, so many people think the country is going in the wrong direction.
Nobody thinks this guy is a competent president.
Nobody thinks he is the president, as far as I can tell.
However, when they match him up against Trump, the numbers are just about equal.
And it seems to me that's a danger sign.
I mean, it seems to me that there's a danger here that Trump might alienate enough people so that he's like the only person who could lose to these clowns who are now running the show.
Right.
So what's the problem with President Trump?
I was recently at a family wedding and after the ceremony, we had the reception and somebody walks up to me.
Biden's Danger Sign00:02:51
I hadn't met him before.
He says he's a big fan of conservatives and says, hey, great to meet you.
Can I get a selfie?
Yes, sure, blah, blah, blah.
And then he says, is President Trump going to run?
I told him what I just told you.
And he said, oh, that's a problem because I have lots of friends.
And you know, the tweets.
And this is the easiest way to piss me off, Andrew.
Because if you're a conservative and you tell me he was mean and social media this and tweets that and look at the polls, I say, I want to grab you by the lapels and shake some common sense into you.
Really, look at the price of gas.
How much did it cost you to fill up your tank of gas today?
And then talk to me about tweets.
Talk to me about the 13 people killed U.S. servicemen and women unnecessarily in Kabul.
And then talk to me about the tweets.
Talk to me about the highest inflation in 30 years and then get back to me about the tweets.
I want conservatives to get a grip and perspective.
It's like Larry Elder, my Salem colleague, says.
I've used this again and again and again.
Two pro-golfers watching somebody tee off.
And one of them says, wow, look at his stance.
Look at the way he holds the club.
And that swing, the hip movement, my gosh.
The other one's not even looking at the golfer.
He's sipping on his beer and he just comments, I don't care.
Tell me where the ball lands.
Where did the ball land for four years, America?
Okay.
If you're a conservative and you've got problems with mean tweets, you're not a conservative.
Okay, so this is why we do these interviews long distance, because I know you're a violent human being.
You're much bigger than I. I'm a Conley Telly Bear.
Don't you know that?
And you're the galactic master.
Come on.
But I want to be precise in what I'm saying, okay?
Because it's not the mean tweets as mean tweets.
It's the mean tweets as real politic.
And here's what I'm talking about.
Trump did, I mean, it's so easy to forget some of the great things Trump did.
The fact that he wiped ISIS literally off the face of the map, a map the size of Ohio, is just completely forgotten.
The fact that he brought the economy back, it was going strong.
It was good for every person in the economy, but best for the people at the bottom of the economy, best job numbers for black people, all of this.
However, however, his meanness and his, I call it what it is, borish behavior, his unkind behavior, hurt him politically.
It hurt him politically, both with some voters who maybe you're right, they were being too nice, but they are, they're the voters, they get to put in the vote.
But it also hurt him in terms of statecraft, in terms of gathering majorities in the House and the Senate.
Let's Talk Real Politics00:15:11
So for instance, when he wanted to repeal Obamacare, which I think would have been a major, major victory, John McCain basically threw him off because he had mistreated John McCain.
That's bad politics.
Never mind whether McCain deserved it, never mind who McCain was.
That's bad politics.
And he did that a lot.
I mean, almost every thing that hit him from within the Republican Party came from people whom he had mistreated.
And I think that that is, he was not a good statesman.
He did not pass a lot of laws that we can look at and say, wow, that really changed the game.
He did a lot of these executive actions, which Joe Biden insanely, but still easily tossed aside.
So is it possible that his attitude, let me put it the other way, is it possible that he was the man for the moment because he was the one guy who had the stones to say the sorts of things that he said, but that moment has passed because now he has made himself obsolete.
Do you think that there's any possibility of that?
Right.
This is the four-hour lecture, right, Drew?
Okay.
So first things first, let's talk Real politics.
Question for you.
Who would be president today if the China virus didn't exist?
Trump.
Okay.
So it's not about tweets or meanness.
His political vulnerability wasn't a function of, you know, McCain being an ass.
It was the China virus.
We can debate the last election, but mailing out 80 million mailout ballots is a beautiful way to steal an election.
And when you've got footage, CCTV footage after the GOP poll watchers have walked out of the building of election workers pulling suitcases of ballots from under their hiding place under the table.
Don't talk to me about there's no evidence.
So COVID was the reason Donald Trump isn't in the second year of his second term right now.
That's a fact.
Secondly, let's look at whether or not his boorishness really matters.
Donald Trump, and that's just total facts.
Donald Trump gained after four years of being called 24 hours a day, a Nazi, a misogynist, a white supremacist, an agent of Russia, gained 11 million more votes than he did in the first election.
Not only that, he got the highest proportion of Hispanic and black votes for a Republican president since the 60s.
And by the way, if you want to believe that the senile old Git got 81 million votes, you know, fine.
But he also got more votes than any other president in history.
So Donald Trump, despite the tweets and the meanness and the boarishness, got more votes than any other incumbent president in history.
So let's talk about Realpolitik.
On top of that, you talked about the fact that he mistreated others.
Did he really?
Give me an instance of when Donald Trump punched first, when without justification, he said something unjustified and mean about somebody.
You won't find it.
In fact, as somebody who worked for him when he was plain old Mr. Trump and then in the White House, I will tell you, and this is what the left will never understand.
He is one of the most compassionate and caring individuals I've ever met.
Yeah, he does a mean Twitter game and, you know, he can do the WWF wrestling stuff, but he is a very compassionate individual.
Just look at his First Step Act and look what he did for black Americans who had been incarcerated.
When it comes to passing laws, why did he not pass a lot of laws?
Who passes laws, Drew?
Is it the president?
No, but the president does wrangle Congress.
Isn't that one of his favourites?
And here's the issue.
Congress wasn't on his side.
Mitch McConnell to this day hates Donald Trump.
Paul Ryan, you know, he's just the senatorial version of Paul Ryan.
So the idea that you blame it on him likewise isn't a reading of what happened under four years.
But the fact that he confirmed more than 300 federal judges, that is on Donald Trump and getting Mitch McConnell to do that.
So let's talk about his real successes and then let's talk about moving forward, why he has to be president.
And I'm not talking about some prophetic pronouncement.
The deep state is, I didn't use the phrase, we discussed this.
I didn't use the phrase when I joined the White House.
After two weeks of seeing what the reality of the swamp is, I said, yeah, the deep state is real.
But when I second, when I try to second four of my former students who are now at the FBI and the CIA to come and work for me in the White House, which is a completely normal thing a deputy can do, should take about 10 days to transfer their clearances.
Well, it doesn't happen for six months, Drew.
And then somebody from the FBI, senior guy, who's a good guy, comes to my office and says, hey, hey, Sab, you know those guys you've seconded by name?
You're never going to get them, despite the fact that you're a deputy to the president.
And here's a direct quote.
Because the seventh floor, the leadership suite, the seventh floor of the Hoover building of the FBI considers this White House to be the enemy, quote unquote, the enemy.
It's not just Michael Claim.
Right.
So the idea that another politician is going to come in and do what needs to be done, I want Donald Trump back in office because we need a berserker with a flamethrower and some claymores who's going to either shut down the EPA, the Department of Education, or move it to Dakota because we have a bureaucracy that thinks presidents come and go.
We don't really care and we're going to decide, not the electorate.
So, you know, nobody has the potential to be that disruptive force again, not even Ron DeSantis, like my former boss.
So for all of these reasons, go ahead.
So this kind of raises an issue that do we still believe, because I do, and I sometimes wonder when I'm talking, do we still believe that America is there?
Do we believe that the American system is still there?
Now, everything you say about this deep state, I believe you.
You don't have to sell me on this.
This is the thing.
We have so many areas of agreement that it's not, we're not, we're fighting over the details to some degree.
But do you believe that the American system is still there?
Because Trump did things.
I don't agree with you that he did not treat people in an undeservedly mean way.
I think he treated Bill Barr in an undeservedly mean way.
Oh, ho, ho.
I'll tell you stories about Bill Barr, but carry on.
All right, carry on.
But the one thing he did that seemed to me unbelievably anti-real politic was Georgia after the election.
If you want to overturn an election, you have got to prove, you cannot just say it, and you can't just say that there is proof.
You have got to prove that that election was stolen.
And you've got to do it in a court of law.
And listen, the Supreme Court was conservative.
It was not turning things down.
It was not turning cases down because they hated him.
It was turning cases down because I read some of those briefs.
They were not suitable to overturn an election.
If the left overturned elections like that, and they would, we would both hit the roof.
He lost, Trump lost Georgia by pointing us back into this thing that had gone by and was passed instead of looking forward to winning the future, instead of making sure that Joe Biden would be slowed down by a majority Republican Congress.
That seems to me narcissistic.
I mean, all politicians are narcissistic, but you don't want to put yourself in front of the country.
And I want to know, when you say he's got to come in with a Claymore and a flamethrower, I know you're speaking metaphorically, but is it a metaphor that indicates that you don't believe that there's a system there that can be manipulated the way the American system is supposed to be manipulated?
So let me be clear here.
The question is, is the America we wish to salvage still there?
Is that the question?
Yeah.
I mean, Ron DeSantis is a statesman.
He knows how to get things done.
Okay.
So his all of those things you discussed with regards to Georgia has nothing to do with mean tweets.
You're talking about, you know, you're shifting between two things.
You're mixing two taxonomies.
You're talking about realpolitik and style, and these are not the same things.
No, but I'm only talking about style as it affects real politicians.
Everything I'm saying is about real politics.
Let me try and separate them for a second.
What he did in Georgia and what he's done since the election, and I tell you something, and I think I've said this on my radio show.
When I saw him in New York after the election, I was sitting there and he was saying some stuff I thought was very bad about election theft and what to do about it.
And literally, I'm sitting in front of his desk.
There's only three of us in the meeting.
And I said to myself, Seb, this is it.
You got nothing to lose.
You've been a deputy assistant to the president as an immigrant to the United States.
Just shoot straight.
And he wasn't in a good mood because of somebody else.
And I said, Mr. President, what you are talking about, you must not follow through with.
This idea of reinstatement, this idea of whatever.
I said, there's only two groups that want you to do that.
The Rhinos, who want you to fail, and the DNC, who likewise want you to fail.
They want you to go down that avenue.
Now, why was he talking about that?
Why was he talking the way he did about Georgia?
Not because he's mean, not because of his ego.
He was pissed and he had every right to be pissed, given what happened in November.
I agree.
He was getting some really, really crappy, crazy psycho advice from people, sadly, sadly, otherwise respectable individuals like Professor Eastman at the Claremont Institute, who are saying, yes, you can get reinstated, Mr. President, because in 1782, a deputy sheriff in Louisiana was reinstated.
I mean, people are smoking crack, old lawyers who think that you can make a national case for a presidential countering of an electoral college.
I mean, Eastman by himself has done more damage to the conservative movement than maybe the Democrats.
So he's getting crappy advice.
And that is one of our biggest problems.
If we win, we've got to have a bench and we've got to have people who aren't crazies.
The Lynn Woods have to be excoriated, have to be completely ostracized, and we have to destroy the swamp.
When it comes to, I think, and I want to interview you for a second because we've had this discussion for hours now over cigars.
What's the issue, Drew?
Is it because you think, is your issue, because I know you're not one of these shrinking violet NRO types who think, oh my gosh, he's not one of us and he doesn't have the bow tie.
Is your issue because you think he can't win?
That's, yes, that's my fear is that he can't.
And, you know, my fear is that he can't win and that he cannot wrangle with Congress to pass actual laws.
And to me, I still believe in the system enough.
And you're absolutely, listen, I voted for Trump twice.
I supported him most of his presidency.
I thought it was hilariously fun.
And he was putting, and he changed the Republican Party for the better.
There's no question about it.
I give him full credit for this.
I think he lost it when he lost the election for whatever reason.
I think he lost track of what he was doing.
And I think it has hurt him and maybe irremediably.
And that worries me.
I do not want to lose an election to these clowns in the White House.
So again, let's just try and take personal proclivities and emotion out of it for a second.
Number one, the threat is dire.
I mean, truly dire.
We're a little bit more.
Two million illegal.
Right.
So two million illegal aliens in 11 months.
The rise of Russia, China, you name it, attempts to pack the Supreme Court on.
And I mean, we know this is truly a dire situation.
As a result, we need somebody who's not a politician.
And God bless Ron for what he's doing in Florida.
But he's a politician.
He is a politician.
Okay.
And a lot of what he's done is really mirroring Trump.
What he's done in the last three years is really, you know, it's the mini-me version of Trump.
Without Trump, we wouldn't have this Ron DeSantis.
It's crazy.
That's a fact.
That's right.
Trump is the man of the moment.
Right.
And as such, let's look at the playing field.
There is nobody, nobody who can mobilize people like Donald Trump can, not even DeSantis.
And you have to play with that deck.
And on top of that, what do you think it's going to be like three years from now?
I mean, look at what happened in Virginia.
I live in the Commonwealth.
I know Glenn Young.
He's been on my shows.
He's a super nice guy.
Surrounded by swamp-dwelling rhinos who tried to prevent him coming on my show.
Glenn Young didn't win Virginia because of Glenn Young.
He pivoted in the last three weeks to a culture war statement.
He saw the Mama Bears at the school board meetings and he said, oh, that's interesting.
I'm going to ban CRT first day in office.
That's why he won.
He won because of Stacey Langton, Short Tail Cooper.
He won because of what Andrew Breitbart has been telling us, you know, since he wrote his book, Righteous Indignation.
So that is the truth.
This is a culture war to save America.
And that cannot be done by a politician.
I'm sorry.
Donald Trump broke the rule book.
Can I just remind all of your viewers?
I find it amusing that an immigrant with a funny accent has to remind people born here.
Do you know what happened in 2016?
Americans did something they had never, ever done before in the history of the Republic.
From Washington to Obama, every single president was a stinking member of the swamp.
They were either retired generals, congressmen, senators, or governors.
Every single one.
In 2016, Americans chose a person who'd never even run for county dog catcher before.
And it was the first time he ran and he won.
That has changed politics forever.
People have had enough with politicians.
Look, look at Kamala Harris's approval ratings.
Look at Biden's approval rating.
You know, they're choosing people who from the get-go, nobody wants to vote for.
They're just the easy establishment choice.
So we have to continue that fight.
And I don't see anybody who can do what he did.
And the last point I'll make, for a 75-year-old guy, it's shocking how much of a quick learn he is.
Hand On Heart, Hand On Heart00:01:20
He has to be surrounded by people who have his interest at heart and to the point of ego.
Of course, he's got a big ego.
He's Donald Trump.
Okay.
All right.
But I tell you this right now, hand on heart, hand on heart.
I swear to you, I saw this when I was alone with him in the Oval, just the two of us, which doesn't happen a lot.
The only reason this man ran, and think about everything he's gone through, his wife, his children, his family, the only reason he ran is because he loves America.
There's nothing false about his love for America.
And he wanted every American to prosper and to be safe.
Shockingly, and this is what the left will never understand, Drew, whether or not you voted for him.
If you have voted for Hillary or if you wanted Bernie to win, doesn't matter.
You're an American.
He wants you to be safe.
That is why he can win again.
All right.
I got to stop you there.
I'm out of time.
I hope you will come back soon and we'll continue this conversation.
Trump is lucky to have you on his side, Tworker.
He really is.
You're an honest man and a true loyalist.
So hang on.
Hang on.
I want to keep this bipartisan at the end of the show after all my railing.
So I've got your gift for you.
It's our new t-shirt from our store.
If you're woke, you're a loser.
Okay.
So I'm going to keep that for our next cigar evening.