Sebastian Gorka argues Trump’s Middle East peace deals—eight in eight months, including a $5T investment push—mark a historic shift, excluding Iran and engaging hostage families. His administration eliminated 380+ jihadists by reversing Biden-era bureaucratic delays, like the 18-month unchecked ISIS leader neutralized within Trump’s first week back. Gorka credits Trump’s focus on trade, security, and local partnerships over Bush-style regime change, contrasting it with what he calls the prior administration’s spiritual detachment and legal overreach, including targeting Senate members and Catholic groups. Optimistic about suppressing global jihadism, he ties it to Trump’s economic leverage and hints at a potential European "Bulldog" revival, echoing JD Vance’s sovereignty push and Brexit’s 17.3M votes. [Automatically generated summary]
Chasing Terrorists: Willpower and Difference00:10:33
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Dr. Sebastian Gorka.
Every time I see this man, he looks happier than the last time I saw him.
He's approximately eight feet tall, and I think one day he's just going to float up into the ether because, first of all, his loyalty and commitment to Donald Trump has been completely justified.
And secondly, because he is now the director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and he is basically chasing, chasing terrorists all over the place.
In fact, I can't even make fun of you anymore for your James Bond villain voice because I'm afraid some drone is going to come in.
He's making fun.
He must be a terrorist.
So this has been a jolly week.
Your boss seems to have struck a deal in the Middle East.
That's pretty amazing.
It's hard to internalize them.
We have had eight peace deals in eight months.
If you have one peace deal in a four-year term, that's okay.
Two, remarkable.
One a month.
It beggars belief.
You would not believe it in a fictional novel, even one of your fictional novels.
And this one, the fact that President Trump, with his incredible team of my immediate boss, the acting National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, our special envoys, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, if we bring peace, I had a rabbi in the West Wing today actually use the president's language.
He said, yeah, this is the peace deal for 3,000 years.
This is the one that could actually make a difference.
The fact that we have every nation of the region engaged, you know, outside of Iran, it's a fantasy come true.
And I engage with the hostage families every week because we have U.S. nationals who are involved.
And just the videos and the photographs and the messages I received from the hostage families on the announcement, is there anything better than that?
Maybe the birth of your first child, but to have hostage families who you just seen 24 hours previously.
I hope your guys can drop in the photograph.
But my boss, Marco, whispering to President Trump at the Antifa Roundtable, saying, sir, and then that note that we could read through the backside of that says, they need you now.
We've got the peace deal.
Can you come to a phone?
You're the master of fiction.
Doesn't this beggar belief?
It was amazing.
It was an amazing moment.
It was actually, you know, you sat there with your eyes wide open.
I was just joking with my son that when Reagan won the Cold War, they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Gorbachev over trying to keep the Soviet Union alive.
So I think, you know, Yah Sinoir is going to have a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize any day.
It is truly amazing.
You and I have talked about the state that you found our security enterprise in when you arrived.
This kinds of things that you were looking at.
Can you describe that to the audience?
Can you tell them what you saw when you walked in there?
Well, look, it's obvious what had happened for the four years prior to that in terms of just the utter disregard and the contempt that the Biden administration or the people who are actually running the puppet, who was Biden, had for the U.S. Constitution and for the rights of innocent Americans.
From President Trump himself facing 700 years in prison, having his home raided by armed agents of the FBI, to Mike Flynn, to Steve Bannon, to Peter Navarro being leg shackled at Reagan Airport as he's taken away on a contempt of Congress charge to serve time in prison for something.
Eric Holden never served time in prison for, exactly the same quote-unquote offense, right down to the targeting of Catholics by the FBI because they go to Latin Mass.
And now we know the spy, the spying on eight members of the Senate on absolutely spurious lack of predicate, false reasons.
That's the stuff we know of.
And then I come in the building to take over counterterrorism for the president.
And all I hear for my first week traveling through the intelligence community, elements of the Department of War, oh, that sounds nice, just being told, sir, we'd like to get back to our job of killing jihadis.
We basically have not been allowed to do that for four years.
Everything had to be approved of by Jake Sullivan, the arch perpetrator of the Russia hoax as national security advisor, and then signed off by the sonambulant alleged commander-in-chief, Joe Biden.
And of course, what was the result?
You know, bad guys roamed the earth for four years.
Well, on day eight of the administration, we turned that around.
This is now declassified.
You can read about it in the Daily Mail and the New York Post.
And we showed the president this piece of intelligence about a leading ISIS jihadi in Somalia walking freely around a terrorist camp.
And we showed him the photograph and the map.
And he said, What do you mean we've been watching him for 18 months?
Kill him.
And we signed, he signed the operational order with that iconic Sharpie pen.
And within that go order, we snapped back the rules of engagement from the first administration that allowed combatant commanders when they see a bad guy who's got American blood on his hands or who is plotting to kill Americans to kill them with prejudice.
And that's what we've been doing.
I can report to you now on classified.
Upwards of 380 leading jihadists have been turned into red mist.
That's excluding the Houthi campaign.
And thanks to incredible work by the likes of special envoy Adam Bowler, Rick Grinnell, Steve Witkoff himself.
So it's Tom Clancy, but this time it's real, my friend.
It's real.
That's amazing.
I don't know how you would, but do you have any insight into what they're thinking, letting people who kill Americans run free like that?
What were they thinking?
Look, it's probably a multitude of things, but it's definitely a deadly cocktail, a concatenation of two things.
Number one, I said this when I had my national radio show on my TV show.
What do you expect, Drew, if half of the political elite detest the country of which they are, you know, the rulers?
If you think America is the problem, if you think America is the 1619 project, endemic slavery, neocolonialism, white rage, then you're not going to do anything to protect America.
You're going to dismantle the borders, give billions of dollars to Iran.
You cannot spiritually support the thing you think is the problem, number one.
And then, number two, beyond that, and I, oh my gosh, my first months in the administration, when I spoke to anyone who really cared and he wanted to do counterterrorism and wanted to smite our enemies, one word came up again and again and again: will the will to take action.
Even if you don't hate America, it's not enough to protect America unless you have the willpower to do it.
And this is why it is just a delight, a spiritual revivification of your soul every day to come into this building, because is there a more fulsome expression of love of country combined with willpower than Donald J. Trump,
a man who literally took a bullet for this nation, a man who will go into the lion's den and speak the truth again and again and again, who will, you know, allow me to negotiate with the Taliban to bring back American hostages.
Willpower.
You've got to love America and you've got to have the will to act.
And that's what we're witnessing right now, whether it's Rwanda, 30 years of bloodshed, whether it's Thailand, whether it's smiting the drug traffickers' speedboats.
You've got to want to act.
It's not enough to say, I love America.
You've got to do something about it.
It's Roosevelt.
It's the man in the arena, Drew.
Yeah.
What is the difference?
There were times in the first administration, though it was a good administration until the COVID hit.
It was actually doing quite well.
But there were times when Trump looked like Gulliver tied down by the Liliputians.
It seemed like everywhere he turned, there was a block.
What's the difference this time out there?
Oh, well, two massive things.
The constant and unrelenting attempts to undermine the will of the people from the outside.
So that's the Russia hoax that's spying on the president, that's, you know, fanning Willis on down.
I mean, it's every use of lawfare against the president to stymie him as an expression of the will of 70 million Americans.
And then let's be brutally honest, and I've spoken about this publicly, the traitors in the building.
When you've got, you know, John Kelly as his chief of staff, and it pains me to say this because I love the Marines, a man who is monitoring the president's phone calls.
Why is the president in the first administration having to call me on a Sunday afternoon at home?
Well, because that's when John Kelly isn't monitoring his phone calls.
You know, there are no John Vindemans in this building now taking the top secret presidential discussions with heads of state and leaking them to the Washington Post.
So, you know, there's, I'm not going to say roast-tinted Pollyanna, but the left is broken, right?
The fact that right now the left has nothing to say except, you know, medical insurance for illegals and, you know, Maryland fathers should be allowed to be human traffickers.
You know, the left is broken in comparison to what it was eight years ago.
Your Dog's Excitement Says It All00:13:19
And also, when you've got Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, my buddies running the government, just hell for leather to express the will of the American people and the president's intent.
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You're out there tracking these jihadis who want us dead and have killed some of us in the meantime.
Meanwhile, on the streets of New York, outside Fox News on October 7th, the second anniversary, they're chanting, let's do more.
We got to do more October 7th.
And the crowd is chanting it back to the guy, the speaker, and he's saying we've got to do worse October 7th.
Is there something we can do to roll these guys, these characters up?
I mean, should that be, you know, obviously, I'm a First Amendment purist.
I want people to be able to speak, but is calling for massive atrocities, is that something that actually should be happening?
So here's the good news.
I mean, you know, the bad news is for decades we've had people pumping this garbage into our colleges, funding it through massive NGOs.
But here's the good news.
You know, I'm working the external threat from global jihadism, but you've got the MAC truck, the freight train who is Stephen Miller as the Homeland Security Advisor, who is on a mission.
And it's not just about building the wall or getting millions of illegals out of this country and rolling up the cartels in Mexico.
He is very much on this issue.
He understands this.
He's a man of Jewish faith himself.
He understands what it means to have from the river to the sea to be chanted on the Cambridge campus and elsewhere in Berkeley.
Of course, I am a First Amendment absolutist as well.
But if you are promoting genocidal ideologies, if you're being funded by organizations that are designated terror organizations who have committed terrorism outside the United States, there are judicial consequences, there are administrative consequences, there are immigration consequences.
So, yes.
So we've woken up.
We are taking action.
And with Stephen working the domestic portfolio, that will be dealt with and is being dealt with as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's pretty.
I mean, I'm not shocked by much, but it's kind of shocking to see people just standing there calling for these atrocities.
One of the things that has been incredibly interesting about the effectiveness of what's going on in the Trump administration, as opposed to the George W. Bush administration, was that you don't seem to be trying to transform the Middle East.
You just seem to be trying to kill off the people who are deadly toward us.
Is that policy?
I mean, part of this deal with Hamas was done with the help of Qatar, who are not only always our best friends.
Is that part of the policy to let them be themselves as long as they're not killing us?
Is that the way that works?
It's more than that.
So it's very clearly, it's not the isolationism of the crappy neo-Buchananite knockoffs.
It's not that.
But the president doesn't want to do regime change, isn't interested in forever wars, invading other people's countries.
So, you know, he's not a neoconservative former Trotskyite, like the key thinkers of the second Bush administration.
But it's not just the leave them alone.
Listen to what he said on October the 8th, I think it was, or the 9th.
He said in an impromptu press conference, he said, these Arab states have helped us.
Everyone is on board.
And you know what?
This isn't just peace.
These nations can prosper with us.
Even the people of Gaza and the West Bank, what we are talking about is eight years ago, it was about security.
It was about crushing the caliphate, you know, smiting the evildoers, the jihadists.
What was the message of the president's incredible trip to the Middle East recently?
It was, yes, it was security, but now we're moving to prosperity.
In the White House, we said, maybe he's going to come back with a trillion dollars.
Maybe.
He came back with almost $5 trillion worth of investment.
It's a very conservative argument.
The left, you know the left.
It doesn't matter whether you're a socialist or a commie or a democrat.
The left believes in zero sundrew, right?
There's one pie.
The system is closed and you can't make more wealth.
Conservatives, we understand there is no limit to the ingenuity of the human and how we can generate more wealth and prosperity.
President Trump's message to everyone from Vanuatu to the EU to Canada to the people of the West Bank and of Gaza.
You want to prosper?
You want to grow the pie?
Let's do it together.
That's the whole message of the tariff system.
Don't take us for chumps.
Don't take us for a ride, but you want to work with us?
Do you want to have AI, joint ventures?
Do you want to have quantum as our joint future?
It's not just ignore and get out of the region and kill the bad guys who need killing.
It's, you know what?
We want every country to be a MA country.
We want, you know, let's make Egypt great again.
Let's make, you know, Belgium great again.
If you want to do it with us, then we will let you be a member of the civilizational success that MAGA will bring to the world.
Are you optimistic about that?
I mean, you've taken out hundreds of bad guys, but obviously this movement, this jihadi, you know, Islam Brotherhood movement, it pops up in Africa, it pops up every place these guys show up.
Do you believe that you can extinguish it or at least effectively extinguish it?
My mission is not to fully extinguish it, because if that were true, I could say we're going to eradicate murder and we're going to eradicate prostitution, right?
Terrorism is going to exist.
I want to put myself out of business in terms of terrorism not being a strategic threat to the United States.
The NSC should not need to have a senior director for counterterrorism.
It should be a local issue that is suppressed and dealt with by our friends and partners and sometimes by the odd drone that we use to take out a bad guy.
I want it to be suppressed.
And yes, I am optimistic.
Why?
Because this is a president who understands what statecraft truly is.
In U.S. government, and I've seen this, I've been working in the U.S. government since 2008.
We have what we call silos of excellence.
The guys in the Department of War do the war stuff.
The diplomats at Foggy Bottom do the diplomacy stuff.
The people at Treasury do the Treasury stuff.
The president doesn't separate these functions.
Why was the first deal with Zelensky about rare earth minerals?
Because the president knows if you tie Ukraine to America economically, Vladimir Putin will never invade that country because the risk is too high to him.
We can defeat global jihadists.
We can defeat any threat if we understand the overlay of trade and economics.
This is the golden, this is the special source of what the president does.
He understands that all of these things are interconnected.
Global trade, economics, and national security are one unified function.
And so what you see is a world where people, basically a world built on trade that is going to keep these guys from blowing things up because it's not good for us.
Yeah.
I mean.
Yeah, or local actors in the interests of having good trade relations with us will step up to the plate and help us suppress the mutual enemies.
There are a lot of people who want to help us in Africa and the Middle East because it can open doors to other things that are good for their people as well.
So one of the best moments of the administration, my favorite moments, was the Munich speech of JD Vance.
And he was, you know, the stuff he said really resonated with me.
You don't want to give up on Europe.
You know, they've kind of been the source of Western culture for thousands of years.
And yet the question that he asked, if you guys are not going to support free speech, if you're not going to support freedom, where is our alliance?
How do you feel about that?
When I hear news out of England, I know sometimes the news distorts things, but they seem to have kind of lost the plot of their country.
And it's very hard to imagine how they get back.
How do you see the future there?
I'm sad.
I grew up in the UK to refugees, escape communist Hungary.
I don't recognize much of the country of my birth.
It's definitely not the UK that I grew up under Margaret Thatcher.
But look, look at Brexit.
I'm a happy warrior, and I look at the biggest vote in British history.
17.3 million Brits said, we want our sovereignty back and we want a nation state that defines its own identity.
Yes, those voices are, for the time being, not in ascendance, but Nigel is still there.
I believe the Bulldog spirit hasn't been suppressed.
I think it was so joyous to watch the president and my colleagues with King Charles at that sumptuous, sumptuous state dinner.
So I think the rebirth of Europe is not out of the question.
You look at great nations like Poland that never gave up their faith even under communism.
You see the resistance of Gudapesch to the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.
And I would say, in addition to the incredible Munich speech by the vice president, go back and listen to the president's, as far as I'm concerned, most important speech from his first administration, June of 17 in Warsaw, where he asked one trenchant question at the end.
And he said, the only issue of the age, the only question is whether we in the West will have the will, goes back to that issue, the will to defeat those who wish to destroy our civilization.
I think there are those in Europe who understand that.
They need their own MAGA political revolution, just like we had ours.
Maloney is doing great stuff.
Brexit isn't dead.
So I never give up hope because the West is the greatest civilization the world has ever seen.
And with President Trump behind the Oval Office, we've got a shot again.
Sebastian, it's great to see you.
You guys are doing a terrific job.
It really is amazing.
I'm proud to know you.
And I hope to get to talk to you again soon.
You're a good friend.
And it'll have to be over a cigar.
Anytime.
Anytime.
See you, buddy.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Always good to talk to him.
The reason I always enjoyed having Gorka on the show is when Trump was controversial.
He always supported him, but he always supported him honestly.
He has always been straightforward with me.
He's never come on and twisted the truth or twisted his arguments.
He has said when, you know, maybe Trump was doing something flawed, but he's always basically supported me.
And he's been proved right.
I think there's just no question about it.
It's always good to see him.
And I'm glad he is out there hunting these people down.
And I have to be nicer now to him because he's got all those drones and I don't want to get blown up.