Sebastian Gorka - Why We Fight - Why We Fight - Defeating America's Enemies - With No Apologies

Sebastian Gorka:Yeah, sure! So the United States was covered for at least thirty years in this massive permafrost layer of ice which is political correctness, and it had frozen over the media, education, politics, all of it, to the extent that by the Obama administration, the federal government was telling you who could use which bathroom. So just insanity. And then along comes a guy, who the first day I met him in June 2015 in his office in Trump Tower, the first thing I knew about this man is he’s the kryptonite of political correctness. I mean, he couldn’t care less about what the New York Times or CNN says about a given issue. So along comes this man to this layer of ice frozen over the country and bam ! He slams into it like an icebreaker and smashes through the ice. So he breaks a pathway for the nation to open up that sea lane.

And my argument to conservative audiences is that this is great, this is monumental. It wasn’t going to be the panther. The panther could have never won. It had to be the bull. It had to be the icebreaker, but if you know your physics of ice breaking, you can send that thousands-of-tons’-worth of ship in there with its tungsten hull, and it rides up on the ice, slices through it. But if you don’t have the flotilla behind it that comes up and keeps that passageway open, what actually happens? In real life, if you send one ship in, it breaks a path, almost instantaneously the ice comes around the bow and re-knits itself right around the ship and reseals. So this is the moment in the conservative movement where we have to get serious about what does it mean to be a conservative in the twenty-first century? What is the role of government? What is national security? Donald Trump is the catalyst. Now we have to do the heavy lifting of ideology and politics and policy.

Dave:Do you think he will, years from now when we look back, be anything other than the catalyst? How do you consider his ideas compared to traditionally conservative ideas? Because just in the last couple of months, after signing the omnibus bill, … there’s a big mess in Syria, we’re not sure if there’s going to be more intervention or not. He seems to be doing some things that are probably a bit more “big government” than perhaps you want, or than certainly his base seems to want. So where do you think he fits, actually, between catalyst and the flotilla?

Sebastian Gorka:First things first. I hate labels, personally. I think that labels are lazy thinking, and in the case of Donald Trump they’re irrelevant. I’ll credit Monica Crowley with this. The weekend after the election was David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in Florida, which was either going to be a wake or the party it was. And Monica gave a great speech in which she said, “Look, everybody misunderstands who this man is. He was never an ideological candidate because you simply cannot put him in a box because of what he does. Whether it’s his attitude to gay marriage. He’s just a mixture. He was never an ideological candidate. He was an attitudinal candidate.” And she nailed it.

Now what does that mean? Look at the last forty years. This guy is seventy-one years old. He’s not going to change. He is who he is. What has he done for the last forty years as a professional? He’s been committed to one thing: excellence. Whether it’s a golf course in Scotland. Whether it’s a skyscraper in New York. It’s excellence, and all he’s done is he’s taken that concept and he’s translated it into excellence for America once more. And that doesn’t fit into neat, neoliberal, neocon, paleocon … it just doesn’t fit. He’s about getting stuff done and being the best.

Dave:So how do you link that to what the general conservative movement is? I get what you’re saying about labels, and I say it all the time. The labels now, especially because of Trump, the labels are all over the place at this point. The thing I’m struggling to fully grasp about the Trump thing is how does this connect to this huge split? You’ve got the Trump base and then you have the Never-Trumpers, and these people that should be kind of lining up, they can’t get there. How do you connect those things?

Sebastian Gorka:You’re never going to connect with the Never-Trumpers. The Never-Trumpers are pathological. I mean pathological. When Bill Kristol actually tweets out, “In a choice between the Deep State and President Trump, I choose the Deep State!” Bill, you’re not a conservative; you’re a subversive. Get out of the tent! So that’s never going to happen.

The broader question of what does “conservative” mean today, we can’t answer that. Have you seen a good article, a really good article, which understands first principles about what Trumpism is or what it should be? I haven’t. I’ve seen a lot of people who think they know what they’re talking about but who have never met the president. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done, but it’s not going to be done by conservative “establishment” individuals. The NRO [ National Review Online ] is not going to tell you who Trump is. And the NRO is not going to revitalize the conservative establishment. This is a new era. It’s exciting, but we have to get to work to define what it means to be a conservative.

Dave:So that to me is why it seems so obvious that you’re so passionate about this. That no one else was going to do it, and I think that’s sort of what Monica was saying, and that’s sort of what Horowitz has been saying for a long time, that no one else was going to break through. And now it’s imperfect but at least there’s some opportunity.

Sebastian Gorka:Let me be brutally candid. I grew up in the UK to Hungarian parents who escaped communism. I went through the private school system in the UK stiff upper lip and all that stuff, the debate club. So the president’s style is not exactly the style I’m used to. I had to get used to it, and I understand why people have issues. The biggest thing people have issues with on the right are his tweets. I get it. But guess what, who was going to defeat Hillary? It wasn’t Jeb Bush. It wasn’t even Senator Cruz. None of them were going to. The only person who was going to cut through that miasma, who could break through the ice sheet of political correctness, was this rank outsider from Manhattan. Whether you like it or not, to say philosophically, he was the necessary but not sufficient cause of victory. You don’t have to like it, but it had to be him with that style. We tried to do Marquess of Queensbury Rules for thirty years. Where did it get us? Where did it get us? Mitt Romney? Come on guys! It had to be Donald Trump. So now we have to backfill what this all means.

Dave:And that seems to be where I think you and so many of these other people that are part, or formerly, part of the administration, you had a very brief stint at the administration …

Sebastian Gorka:Longer than some …

Dave:Right. Years from now they’ll go, “Wow! He was there for ninety percent longer than everybody else.” But a pretty short stint, seven months. First, can you just tell me how you got involved—because you just mentioned you had only just met him a little before the election in the first place—and just sort of what happened that had you leave, because that will really tie into the media, which we are very much aligned right now.

Sebastian Gorka:So summer of ’15 I got a phone call from a guy called Corey Lewandowski that I’d never heard of, and he said, “Candidate Trump is prepping for the big fall GOP presidential debate on national security. He’d like to talk to you.” I said, “Sure.” So I took the plane, flew to New York, and went to Trump Tower. It was just three of us in Donald Trump’s office, and we had this incredible blue-sky discussion on national security issues, you name it, from the Civil War up to the Middle East to nuclear weapons, all kinds of topics.