When you sit down with Dr. Sebastian Gorka face to face, it is easy to see why he and Donald Trump clicked the moment they met in an office high up in Trump Tower back in 2015.
The chemistry was no accident. Gorka, of course, holds the president in special esteem and makes a point of showing it, but beyond that, they are quite similar and share the same worldview and values. Even their height and affable manner are alike.
Since Trump's return to the White House, Gorka, 54, has the title of deputy national security adviser and senior director for counterterrorism at the US National Security Council, and he is considered one of the most influential figures in the administration.
Having served under Trump in the first term as well, he has no trouble spotting the difference between the two. The current Trump administration is more committed, more unified, and therefore more successful on multiple fronts.
"The biggest challenge for us in the White House is keeping up with President Trump," Dr. Gorka says in an exclusive interview with Israel Hayom's weekend magazine. "We leave our phones outside the secure wing for security reasons, step out every few hours, and discover what else the president has managed to achieve."
"One time it's a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, another time it's something else. He moves at the speed of light. We don't have time to explain everything the president is doing, because he doesn't want to stop. His message to us is 'go and do.'"
"About two weeks ago we sat with him in the Oval Office and presented a plan of action for a very problematic region of the world. He looked at us and asked, 'Can you make it happen?' I answered, 'Yes, sir.' 'Go do it,' was his order. That's leadership. That's why the Left hates him so much."
"President Trump is the ultimate alpha male. You see him meet with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin or other heads of state and you immediately understand he is the boss. You see it in his signature handshake, where he pulls his counterpart toward him, and in many other details."
"At the meeting with Putin in Anchorage, Putin was late and refused to get off his plane for 40 minutes. When they finally both stood on the red carpet, the president raised his hand and pointed upward at stealth bombers passing overhead, escorted by fighter jets. That's alpha, that's leadership, that's the art of closing a deal."
How does that translate into resolving practical issues?
"I also handle, among other things, the hostages portfolio. By virtue of that responsibility, I meet almost weekly with families of hostages, Israelis, Americans, dual nationals. They come to the White House. They say that during a year and a half of the Biden administration, officials only talked to them, decisions were not made, and they were even instructed not to speak publicly about their loved ones because it was embarrassing."
"One father told me they had 100 meetings with Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, but one Trump post saying 'Release the hostages or you will pay' was worth more than 100 meetings with the Democratic administration."
Leadership is more necessary than ever after the murder of Charlie Kirk. Will the administration take a tougher line against the 'woke' movement and its offshoots?
"Charlie Kirk was my friend, as he was to many others in the White House. The vice president was very close to him. After his murder, the mood in the White House changed. We were always serious about addressing 'woke' dangers, but now we've shifted into a higher gear. You saw the speed: the decision to designate Antifa a terrorist organization, and other moves Kash Patel is advancing at the FBI."
"The arrogance of the Left and the 'woke' crowd will be their undoing. They went too far, too fast, on issues that touch most people and upset them. They turned tens of millions of ordinary people against them, folks far from politics, maybe not part of MAGA and maybe not even Republicans, but who can't stomach the idea of a naked man entering a women's locker room because he 'feels like a woman.' We're seeing the revenge of common sense."
"Healing from 'woke' will take time, because of the progressives' infiltration of colleges and because of the teachers' unions, but we're on the right track. Thanks to people like Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy and the homeland security adviser, an unstoppable strike force, and other colleagues at the Education Department and elsewhere, we'll make sure the 'woke' plague is handled properly."
Is this the new resolve that was missing in Trump's first term?
"There's no comparison. Everything is different now versus the first Trump term. We don't have traitors in the White House. I love our Marines and even taught them, but Gen. John Kelly, a former Marine, was a traitor."
"He was White House chief of staff in the first term and monitored the president's phone calls. Alexander Vindman, a lieutenant colonel and National Security Council staffer, leaked classified presidential calls to the Washington Post. Those were acts of betrayal, and now there's nothing like that."
"Instead we have a remarkable team of true patriots, my friends, with Kash Patel at the helm of the FBI, Pam Bondi as US attorney general, John Ratcliffe running the CIA, and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. They want to save not only America, but Western civilization as a whole."
Abraham Accords 2.0
Like other key figures in the Trump administration, Dr. Gorka is a staunch supporter of Israel. During Operation Swords of Iron he repeatedly spoke up for the Jewish state, rebutted false accusations against it, debunked the blood libel of "genocide," and said in an interview that "there is no such thing as Palestine."
His background as a scholar of radical Islamist movements has surely helped him understand the Middle East's players. Because of his forthright views, opponents on the American Left tried to derail his career by tagging him as "Islamophobic" and "extreme," as they do to anyone who clearly sees the threats facing the US and its allies, and by digging for skeletons in his closet, but they failed.
From 2011 to 2013 Gorka was a visiting professor at Georgetown University, where he mainly taught national security topics, and later he built a media career as a conservative commentator.
His breadth of knowledge, expertise, and standing as a Trump confidant paved the way to a top post in Trump's second administration. For that reason, there is no better way to understand the mindset and method of the leader of the world's most powerful nation than to listen to him.
"The president's vision is very clear," Dr. Gorka says. "Look at his list of achievements over the past eight months. Trump is a man driven first and foremost by the pursuit of peace, whether it's peace in Ukraine, peace in Congo, peace in Armenia, or peace in Gaza and the Middle East. He is the man who delivered the historic Abraham Accords. His vision is to be the person who brings peace to the Middle East, to Gaza, a kind of Abraham Accords 2.0."
"Within that, there is a prioritization of the hostages issue and of ending the destruction and the war. If you look at the record of previous US presidents or other heads of state and find that during a four-year term any one of them produced a single peace agreement, that's significant."
"British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, is credited with the peace in Northern Ireland, and that is a big deal. By contrast, this man, my boss, brought seven peace deals in seven months. Our message is that if anyone can fix things and bring an end to a tragic story, assuming it can be fixed at all, it is President Donald Trump."
Back to the war on terror
Although the word "peace" appears again and again in Gorka's remarks, do not be mistaken. He is no naïve pacifist who seeks to appease tyrants or misreads their intentions. The Trump administration's worldview is the opposite of the flower-child approach that may have meant well but always ended up as useful idiocy in the eyes of those who correctly saw it as the West's Achilles' heel.
This administration sees peace as a value, but its doctrine for achieving peace is free of any trace naïveté. Fantasies such as giving Palestinian terrorists land, or a state, certainly have no place in that doctrine.
Gorka and his team are now putting the finishing touches on a new counterterrorism strategy that will be unveiled to the public very soon. Next year will mark 25 years since the 9/11 attacks, and for the White House the symbolism demands finishing the job against key terrorist actors.
Under Biden, targeted killings of terrorists dropped to a minimum, Gorka notes, and US security professionals were frustrated. Trump's return to the White House removed the cork, and since then hundreds of jihadists have been neutralized.
"The goal is to ensure that terrorism no longer poses a strategic threat to America," Dr. Gorka declares. "We will eliminate the key figures in terrorist networks, and once we locate them, they will be destroyed within 72 hours. But we won't stop there, because ideologically driven terrorist organizations can recruit new people."
"You cut off one head of the monster, and it can grow another. So, paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz, I can say that total victory is achieved when you apply the necessary force against the center of gravity of the global jihad movement, namely, its ideology."
"We are throwing out the politically correct 'legacy' of the previous administration. From now on, for US national security purposes there will be only two kinds of terrorists: jihadist terrorists and domestic terrorists."
To confront jihadist ideology, Dr. Gorka is planning an aggressive campaign that will bring in moderate Arab partners from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Morocco, and other countries to smash the ideological credibility of terrorist groups like Hamas, ISIS, or Jabhat al-Nusra. "My favorite example?" he smiles. "After bin Laden was eliminated, we exposed his stash of porn. Some 'holy warrior.' We will present that reality to the world."
Gorka marks another goal: taking politics out of the war on terror. In his telling, the Biden administration harnessed the immense capabilities of the security services to suppress its opponents rather than the terrorists. "Counterterrorism must have one purpose, to protect the innocent and bring the guilty to justice, not to persecute the rival party," Gorka concludes.
That approach also applies to what Israelis call "the day after" in Gaza.
"We believe it's time for the region's states to assume responsibility," Gorka explains. "If they don't like the situation in Gaza, it's time they do something to fix it. That is especially true for Muslim and Arab countries. If it matters to them, let them show the world it matters and roll up their sleeves. That is our expectation."
"In fact, eight years ago, when I was part of the first Trump administration, we made it clear that our friends, meaning America's allies and partners, need to do more for peace and stability. This time, eight years later, expectations are even higher."
"I can illustrate with NATO," he continues, "the organization where I began my career 30 years ago. Back then, we dreamed that each member state would invest 2% of GDP in defense, and it seemed distant and unrealistic."
"And then, three months ago I was in my office in the secure wing of the White House, the TV was on Newsmax with no sound, carrying headlines from a leaders' summit in The Hague, and suddenly a chyron appeared saying President Trump got them all to commit to 5% defense spending."
"My first instinct was to run out of the secure wing and call Chris Ruddy, Newsmax's founder and CEO, to warn him, before he got in trouble, that there must be a mistake in the caption. Surely they meant 2.5% or something like that. There was no way they had really committed to 5%."
"Luckily I checked on Google and saw there was no mistake. After decades of NATO indecision, Trump got them to commit not to 2%, not to 3%, not even to 4%, but to 5%."
Trump's critics prefer to ignore such achievements and claim he only talks.
"Whether you love President Trump, as 80 million American voters do, or you don't, you must admit he knows how to get what matters. Read his book The Art of the Deal, because it's all there. The book explains how he built an unbelievable real-estate empire from scratch, and you can see the method."
"In the last campaign we used a slogan I particularly like: 'Americans, we make the impossible look easy.' That is President Trump incarnate. Signing peace deals like the Abraham Accords looked impossible, but he did it. Wiping out Iran's nuclear facilities looked impossible, but he did it."
"And then there is illegal immigration, the most important issue on which Donald Trump won the last election. Under Biden, 11,000 people entered the US illegally every day. Every day. Over four years, that came to 18–19 million illegal immigrants."
"In the last three months the number dropped to zero. Moreover, we reversed the flow and deported half a million illegal immigrants already inside our borders, the worst and most dangerous of them, cartel operatives, rapists, drug traffickers."
"More than a million others self-deported, meaning they preferred to leave the US voluntarily because they understood that was better than having Tom Homan's people, the administration's point man on eliminating illegal immigration, come looking for them."
With numbers like the ones Dr. Gorka cites, it is hard to argue. Does that prove that "everything is possible" on any issue, as he suggests? The future of Gaza is different from illegal immigration to America.
On domestic matters the administration's will may be enough, and no one is likely to doubt Trump's resolve in his second term. Foreign policy, however, requires partners for the tango, including those willing to absorb Gaza's population, for example.
"It's more complex," Dr. Gorka concedes, "but it doesn't change the bottom line. Watch President Trump in action, listen to him, and you will understand how he gets results."
According to Gorka, Trump's method worked well in another complex case, Ukraine. "Remember Trump's first meeting at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky? At the time there was talk that Ukraine wanted some kind of security guarantee document, perhaps NATO membership, perhaps some other piece of paper. A piece of paper?"
"In 1938 Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich with such a piece of paper, waved it, and declared 'peace in our time.' We don't need to remind ourselves what happened next, the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, the attack on Poland, World War II, the Holocaust."
"President Trump didn't talk about a silly piece of paper from Brussels. He talked to Zelensky about a rare-minerals deal, a business agreement between the US and Ukraine. Why? Chamberlain didn't understand that a piece of paper is worthless, but if Ukraine has thousands or tens of thousands of Americans working there and dozens of American companies building a mining infrastructure and refineries and processing plants, those will be the tightest relations imaginable, and then the Kremlin will have to conclude that bombing Kyiv is not a good idea. That is precisely how President Trump gets things done. It is natural strategic thinking."
How do you translate and apply that in Gaza after Hamas is defeated?
"We said we would take over the Gaza Strip and fix it. What happened after we said that? The Left-liberal mainstream media exploded. 'How dare you do that? Build Trump towers and golf courses?' Countries in the region said, 'Outrageous, what does this man think he's doing?' That lasted 72 hours."
"And then countries in the region that had never done anything for the people of Gaza, that had built high walls to keep Gazans out, began to think, 'Maybe we should do something. Maybe we should invest. Maybe we should play a role in Gaza.' That is the power of a US president in action. He does something, and his move, as if by magic, becomes a catalyst that starts a process most people hadn't considered."
The al-Julani test, and for his patrons
Dr. Gorka's optimism is infectious, and he happily shares more Trump-style success stories. "At the start of the term, the president met at Trump Tower with a Japanese businessman, the owner of a leading tech company," Gorka recalls.
"They went before the cameras, Trump praised the guest for deciding to invest $100 billion in the US, and immediately asked why the investment shouldn't be $200 billion. The Japanese guest chuckled and said, 'You're a better negotiator than anyone.'"
"Later the president made his first trip to the Middle East, and in the White House we hoped the visit might yield $1 trillion in investments. Trump came back with commitments totaling $5.3 trillion."
Does that business approach fit everyone? Does it work with Putin, or with Middle Eastern strongmen like al-Julani?
"I think it will work with Putin, and he's the toughest of all. As for the Islamists, I've studied them for more than a quarter century, and I have no illusions. When I took office in January I asked the intelligence community a simple question, does al-Julani settle for Syria?"
"I'm deliberately using his nom de guerre, because he didn't call himself 'the Golan man' for nothing, so the question is whether he still wants the Golan or whether he decided to become a new Syrian patriot and settle for that. I don't think anyone knows the answer except God."
"But this is where the art of the deal comes in. We have a saying, the dog that catches the bus. Al-Julani is that dog, the man who only dreamed of leading Syria and suddenly got it. You wanted Syria? You've got it."
"We will suspend sanctions for 180 days. Show results. That is our demand not just of Damascus, but also of those who asked Trump to give al-Julani a chance, the Saudis, the Turks, the Qataris. It is now on them to prove that Syria under him can function as a stable state."
That is very different from previous American approaches.
"We are not in the business of regime change and nation building. The only country President Trump wants to build is America. We are not crazy neoconservatives with a Trotskyist past. It is Syria's job to fix Syria, with help from the region's states."
"Al-Julani has one test. Syria must be a Syria for all Syrians, including Christians, Kurds, Druze, Sunnis. For my direct boss, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, this is clear. We are not prepared to wake up one morning to news of another massacre in Latakia or another burned church. Absolutely not. Responsibility now lies with al-Julani and the states that asked the president for a favor."
Have you prepared a big stick in case they disappoint you?
"Look at Operation 'Midnight Hammer.' Statecraft has many components, and the hardest of all, it seems, involves the use of force. Neocon administrations created a fantasy of building democracy in Iraq at gunpoint."
"That could never have worked, just as you can't build Switzerland in Afghanistan with bombs and bags of cash. We, the Trump administration, live in the real world. That said, when force is necessary, you need to know how to use it properly."
"If I had read a description of Operation 'Midnight Hammer' ten years ago in one of Tom Clancy's novels, I would have said it was impossible. And yet, this June I watched it live from the Situation Room beneath the West Wing. Stealth bombers flew from the US, penetrated Iranian airspace without being fired upon, dropped heavy bombs, with ballistic missiles fired from submarines added in, and returned unscathed. We didn't invade, we didn't change the regime, but we turned the nuclear facilities to dust."
So the idea is to use focused and effective force, almost surgically?
"Yes, and in fact this isn't new. That's how we operated in Trump's first term. We reported to the president on hundreds of Russian Wagner fighters operating in the Middle East and destabilizing the region on the Kremlin's behalf."
"'Really?' he asked, and then gave the order, 'Kill them, kill them all.' In the Battle of Khasham, on February 7, 2018, we killed hundreds of Russian special operators on the president's orders. No American president, not even the more hawkish ones like Reagan, did that."
"Or when we reported to the president that Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians for the second time. 'Really?' he asked, asked to see where it happened, and ordered us to destroy the site. It is important to note how and when it was done, precisely while he was hosting China's leader Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago."
"The president leaned over to Xi's ear as they ate the most delicious chocolate cake in the world and said casually, 'I wanted to tell you I just launched 32 cruise missiles at Assad.' Because that was the message to anyone who uses chemical weapons against civilians, whether they are mullahs, whether their name is Kim, or whether they lead a large communist power. That is the art of the deal."
