Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a multi-part series of an Exclusive Interview with former Deputy Assistant to the President, Dr. Sebastian Gorka. In this series, Dr. Gorka talks about the MAGA platform and current problems in the White House. In part one, Dr. Gorka discussed his freedom from the constraints of the White House and how the president can surround himself with people committed to the MAGA agenda. You can read it on Liberty Nation here.
Mark Angelides: That brings me to the next question about the Obama holdovers who are actively working against the make American great again platform. Is there any way you can see that they can be easily removed or will they be a burden over the next 8 years?
Dr. Gorka: There’s no way to easily remove people who disagree with the new Commander-in-Chief and his vision. As in many countries and unfortunately here in America as well, it’s nigh impossible, unless you commit murder in broad daylight in front of TV cameras, it’s very hard to fire a government employee. So, that’s something we’re just going to have to handle, but it can be handled.
Look, people ask me what I’ve learned the most since working in the White House. Number one, the level of hatred that the media who have for people who disagree with them. I mean, I thought I was adequately cynical as the child of people who lived through Fascism and Communism and a father who escaped from a political prison, I thought I understood how bad the media is; I had no idea just how out of touch and just how amoral they’ve become.
But the secondary practical, political thing I’ve learned in the last 8 months is, so I wasn’t on the NFC, I worked for Steve Bannon as a strategist in the office of the Chief Strategist, but I would regularly attend NSC (National Security Council) meetings on key issues, such as Iraq, Syria, the Qatar crisis, China, you name it, and to sit there at the pinnacle of the federal government with inter-agency representatives around the table in the West Wing, in the Situation Room, with people dialing in from outstations across the government from State Department, DIA, CIA, DOD, you name it, and to listen to them for an hour and a half – our average meeting was an hour and a half – to listen to the federal government for an hour and a half debate a key issue and not one participant mentions either the President or his vision or his objectives.
It made me realize that the swamp isn’t just about crooked business-as-usual politicians in Congress, it’s about a massive bureaucracy in which key individuals think that their views in some way outrank the views of the person who has been elected by the people to be the Commander-in-Chief.
After the fifth meeting where I’d be the only person who at the end of the meeting would have to remind everybody involved what the President said yesterday in Warsaw or what he said in Riyadh or what he said to the joint session of Congress made me realize that it’s not just about the political appointees who shouldn’t be in the building, it’s also about the bureaucrats who think they know better. That’s something that the phase 2 of MAGA or the phase 3 of MAGA, when we retake the building, we will have to find ways to assert the president’s vision every day so that we keep the federal government on message.
Mark Angelides: As you’ve mentioned, you’re working towards a true Jacksonian policy agenda. Do you think to get that started that the US is going to have to leave NAFTA behind and cut a lot of the ties they have at present?
Dr. Gorka: Well look, the President has hinted at that just a few days ago. Let me quote Steve Bannon, because the President has changed his views on free trade and is moving more towards the way that economic nationalists understand it.
Free trade is the radical idea. It may be presented as the normalcy, but it is a truly radical idea. Especially when it is misrepresented the way it is today. Free trade, in a system where the key hegemonic actors, China included, exploit the cover of free trade to actually exercise economic warfare against nations such as America, can never, never be in the interests of national sovereignty or the prosperity of our citizens.
The President is a businessman and he is not only a patriot, he wants all Americans, whether you voted for him, or voted for Hillary or didn’t vote at all, he wants all of us to prosper as Americans. And he looks at the current so-called free trade system and he sees how it exploits our workers how it exploits our fair-mindedness in ways that lead to Americans losing their jobs, that lead to our intellectual property being stolen to the tune of billions of dollars every month. Look at the Paris Accord, the Paris Accord tells you that there is a different way of looking at the international system and we look at the nation state as a good thing.
We are committed to the principles of 1776, individual liberty, freedom, the rule of law and of private property but the nation state is not anathema to us and we do not look at it in a pejorative way. On the contrary, to us when nation states are healthy, everybody prospers more.
