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Draining the swamp, with Sebastian Gorka
1.8k Plays1 year ago
It's hard not to see America as a country in decline. Foreign policy attention is stretched, political debate is toxic, the national debt is eye-watering, and the institutions have been ideologically captured.
However, America has been written off before. It's geographic, demographic, economic and military advantages remain the envy of the world.
To discuss American politics as we enter a defining year in the country's history, Will is joined by best-selling author, host of The Gorka Reality Check, and former Deputy Assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka.
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Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Follow Seb here.
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Transcript
State of the Union 2023: Challenges and Elections
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. As we approach the end of 2023, many would argue the State of the Union looks dire. The 2024 presidential election will likely be fought between an incumbent president who barely knows what day of the week it is and a Republican nominee who could conceivably be in jail on election day.
00:00:36
Speaker
Foreign policy attention is stretched across conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, with an arguably greater challenge looming over the Taiwan Strait.
00:00:45
Speaker
The national debt, currently a tick under $34 trillion, is going from eye-watering to blinding. The embarrassing recent performance of university presidents before Congress highlighted the deep cultural rot in the universities. And most of the media is more interested in parroting social justice narratives than shining a spotlight on these serious issues.
00:01:07
Speaker
At the same time, America has been written off before. Its geographic, demographic, economic, and military advantages remain the envy of the world. The country has a rare ability to prosper, almost in spite of itself.
Introduction of Sebastian Gorka
00:01:21
Speaker
To help me understand American grand strategy and politics as we enter a defining year in its history, I am delighted to welcome New York Times bestselling author, host of the Gorka reality check and former deputy assistant to president Trump, Sebastian Gorka. Seb, welcome to Australia.
00:01:38
Speaker
Thank you kindly. I'm not sure I approve of you noting the New York Times bestseller my my conservative publisher actually when they realized how rigged the New York Times bestseller list is and how they block conservatives. I think I just squeaked through for the second printing of my book. They actually removed New York Times bestseller. They just said national bestseller but but thank you. I'm excited to be and I love the name of the podcast Australia and what a great name.
00:02:05
Speaker
Thank you. The spectators American equivalent is Americana, so we thought we'd keep the same linguistic structure. Seb, many politics nerds like me in Australia are well aware of your story. Some may not be.
Gorka's Journey to the White House
00:02:17
Speaker
How does a Brit and the son of Hungarian migrants no less end up advising a president of the United States?
00:02:25
Speaker
Well, that is the encapsulation of the American story. I still get goosebumps when I think about Saturday, January 21, 2017. Everybody else is still hungover from the inauguration.
00:02:41
Speaker
I don't drink, my wife and I don't drink and haven't for 20 years and I decide to go to work because it may be a Saturday but I'm a deputy assistant to the president and I get taken in an unmarked van by a military driver through the security to the West Executive Boulevard into the West Wing, get my pass, pick out my office and I realize, I'm actually getting goosebumps right now, I realize
00:03:06
Speaker
I'm an immigrant, a legal immigrant with a funny accent walking around the White House today after the inauguration. So the path has been a circuitous one. I'm incredibly blessed. So my parents as kids suffered under Nazi occupation in Hungary. They were born in Budapest. Then my father tried to resist the communist takeover in college as a young man, was betrayed by the worst
00:03:34
Speaker
traitor to Western civilization during the Cold War. That's Kim Philby. He ended up arrested, tortured, and imprisoned at the age of 20, got a life sentence. And then six years later, he's liberated by the freedom fighters who captured a Russian tank, realized one Russian tank against
00:03:52
Speaker
thousands is kind of useless but they said hey it's good to break down the gates of the political prison on the outskirts of Budapest and he was liberated and with the 17 year old daughter of a fellow prisoner literally underneath a train car they escaped to the west across a minefield into Austria were interrogated for about six weeks in a refugee camp
00:04:15
Speaker
He didn't know he'd been betrayed from the UK, so he was asked. Back then, the refugee resettlement officers said, there's a handful of countries that are taking Hungarian refugees from communism. You can go to America, you can go to Canada, you can go to Australia, you can go to the UK. And he said, OK, a UK. So he ended up in the UK a few years later. That young woman and that man were married. I was born and raised there. My first language was Hungarian. Then I went to college.
00:04:45
Speaker
I ended up in the recession of the late 90s, of the early 1990s, hating my first job in the city of London doing financial intelligence. And then my dad, once the regime was crumbling in Hungary, sorry, late 80s. What am I talking about? Yeah, late 80s, graduated in 91. So, man, I'm old.
00:05:08
Speaker
My dad gets rehabilitated by the new regime. He's going to Hungary all the time as a now conservative quasi politician. He knows I hate my job in the city and he starts sprinkling my CV, my resume around with his old buddies, these rehabilitated generals who've been in prison with him.
00:05:30
Speaker
And I get a phone call, 1993, sitting at my desk in the city of London in Hungarian saying, do you want to work as an assistant to the deputy minister for defense in the new conservative post-communist government? I thought it was a lark. I thought they were pulling my leg. I said, yeah, sure. Wrote down the number, called them back. Yes, it was the Hungarian Ministry of Defense. So I packed my bag.
00:05:54
Speaker
Got on got in my car got on the ferry drove across europe ended up five years in the first conservative government in hunger in the defense ministry met my american wife in europe and then nine eleven hits and through various permutations
00:06:09
Speaker
I ended up teaching counterterrorism for the Pentagon out of a German base called Garmischpartenkirchen, the George C. Marshall Center. I started working a lot on jihadi ideology. My first book, The Bestseller, was about what al-Qaeda, what groups like ISIS believe and what it's going to take to defeat them.
00:06:27
Speaker
And then one day, just to wrap the story up, I'm a professor at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, prepping for a class. And I get a call from somebody called Corey Lewandowski, no idea who this guy is. And he said, Mr. Trump is prepping for the GOP national security debate this autumn. Would you be interested in potentially assisting him? And I'm like,
00:06:53
Speaker
Well, he's not exactly my style. I went to British private school, debate club, philosophy and theology degree, political science PhD. But I said, at least he's reaching out. So I flew to New York, sat in Trump Tower, literally right across the desk from the future president. There's only three of us in the room.
00:07:13
Speaker
him, me, and Cory in the corner. We have this amazing blue sky discussion about national security from literally the civil war to the utility or non-utility of nuclear weapons. Clearly this guy's really interested. And then halfway through, classic Trump, he just stops the conversation dead, looks at Cory and goes,
00:07:35
Speaker
I like this guy. Let's hire him. And so I signed an NDA. So me and Stormy Daniels, we both signed NDA's with the Trump organization. And- Hopefully for different reasons. Well, yes, for different reasons. And then, and then I started writing in policy papers. So I wrote in policy papers. I can't go into the details because the NDA, but the big ones, you know, China, ISIS, Iran, Russia, and that was his kind of background for the debate.
00:08:01
Speaker
ended up on the transition team and then ended up as deputy assistant to the president in the White House, deputy assistant for strategy. So I was a kind of, Bill O'Reilly called me the national security utility infielder. That was my job. I've also heard you call Trump's pit bull as well, perhaps. The Daily Telegraph did a big thing, you know, the Trump's Trump's pit bull. Yeah, they liked having a guy with my accent, I guess, near the president.
00:08:28
Speaker
We of course will get to Trump, but before we do, I want to go back to the start of that story because I've heard you talk about your father before and the experiences that he went through in Hungary. How does that inform your worldview today?
Lessons from Gorka's Father: American Values and Evil
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, this is, um, I, I often get asked why I, what you can call it, you know, pejoratively, I guess the, the, the, the pit bull aspect or, you know, why I'm pugilistic and why
00:08:57
Speaker
why I'm rather outspoken. If you follow my Twitter feed, you'll see I don't suffer fools gladly. And why I do what I do is very simple. You can sometimes identify moments in your life where you come to a fork and where something happens that will forever change the future trajectory of your life. And for me, it was on vacation on the beach with my parents.
00:09:26
Speaker
My dad was the kind of gorilla of a man. He was huge. He was on the national crew team, the rowing team, when he was arrested. He loved to swim. He loved sports.
00:09:37
Speaker
And I'm playing on the beach with my action man and, you know, making sandcastles or whatever. I think I was like seven or eight. My dad comes out of the ocean after a swim. It's a big bear of a man. And he looks down at me and I noticed something that I hadn't really registered before. And he had these white lines on his wrists and, you know, he was too young to be wrinkled on his wrists. And like a foolish little child, I said, hey, dad, what's that?
00:10:06
Speaker
Without skipping a bit, no emotion, he just looks down at me and he says, that son is where the secret police bound my wrists together behind my back with wire so they could hang me from the roof of the torture chamber. That's when my life changed because from that point onwards, I knew from the scars of my dad's body and then later the details he would write down in his book, Budapest Betrayed,
00:10:35
Speaker
That evil is real. Evil isn't, you know, just something in fairy stories about wizards and dragons. Evil lurks in the heart of men and it walks the earth. And for me, whether it's communists, whether it's fascists, whether it's the Hamas terrorists or whether it's I mean, I spent yesterday morning in Congress watching the unedited body cam footage.
00:11:05
Speaker
of what they did to those women and children on October the 7th as they laughed, as they shouted Allahu Akbar, as they're decapitating a living man on film, as they're cutting off an IDF soldier's head, as they're shooting two beautiful young girls hiding under a table.
00:11:26
Speaker
For me, it's really that simple. As a great president once said, for evil to win all is required is that good men do nothing. So for me, my career has been defined really about around beaming that light on the truth that evil is real. The postmodernist relativists, Foucault, Derrida, the Frankfurt School, our cretins, our morons. You can't negotiate with evil. You have to kill it.
00:11:55
Speaker
And I can understand then why America, and I guess the West more generally is so important to you because at its best, it should be the opposition to that evil, the opposition to that ideology. So let's start with America and where it sits at a 50,000 foot view before we get into the nitty gritty of the politics of the day. Is America an empire in decline?
Is America an Empire in Decline?
00:12:16
Speaker
Well, I never bought the America is an empire. There's a great debate between I think Neil Ferguson and Robert Kagan. I think it was like maybe 10 years ago. I used to use it as one of my teaching tools for the military. Empires don't.
00:12:33
Speaker
invade, and then, after a year, allow the locals to choose their own president and leave. So we don't put pro consuls in forever like Rome did. We put them in maybe for a year or two, whether it's occupied Germany after World War II, whether it's Iraq after the invasion. But we don't let Hamid Karzai take over Afghanistan, and we don't do what Biden just did.
00:13:00
Speaker
leave and leave all of our hardware there so it america is an unusual sui generous kind of actor.
00:13:09
Speaker
Why? Because we may use force, we may invade other people's countries, but even the neocons believe that self-determination is the ultimate goal. So I'll put the empire thing in one box. Are we in decline? I think it's beyond decline. I think we're at a point where we may lose it all. I just wrote a piece
00:13:31
Speaker
today on my substack about what the mainstream media and the intellectual grand deeds on the left did two weeks ago here, as if some central committee had issued the talking points to the editorial board of the New York Times, the Washington Post, a full issue of The Atlantic, and a 5,000-piece article, 5,000-word article
00:14:00
Speaker
by Robert Kagan in the Post. When is the last time the Post had a 5,000-word article? And what was the talking point of every single one of them and the cable TV interviews with the likes of Liz Cheney and Applebaum? The message was literal. I mean, I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but it's as if the talking points had been issued by the Politburo
00:14:20
Speaker
if donald trump is democratically reelected to a second term we will have a dictatorship in america so number one. You just gotta think about the psychological permutations of this insanity a freely elected chief executive.
00:14:38
Speaker
will mean the death of democracy. A freely elected executive will mean the death of democracy, number one. So that's what these people are peddling. And then number two, in Kagan's piece, I focus on, and I did a monologue on my TV show on this. He talks about Trump is Caesar. And I think, why is he talking about Julius Caesar? And then I go back to the summer of 2017, where the Shakespeare in the Park
00:15:08
Speaker
the the theater company in Central Park in New York every night would play Shakespeare's Julius Caesar with the lead role dressed to look like President Trump in a blue suit in a red tie and a blonde wig and every night they would drive the daggers into this effigy of Donald Trump and I'm thinking why is Robert Kagan talking about Trump as Caesar 11 months before the election
00:15:38
Speaker
And you can call me Trans Pitbull or the pugilistic guy from the White House, but when sober, I mean truly, she doesn't have my reputation, when sober individuals like Molly Hemingway used the phrase assassination info prep. She wrote a tweet to this effect that all of these articles
00:16:00
Speaker
are preparing informationally in terms of strategic communications, American culture and the left for a potential assassination of the president. When Alan Dershowitz on my radio show, who's no Trump voter, says he is afraid for the security of the president, when my buddy Dan Bongino
00:16:19
Speaker
biggest podcast, biggest radio show in America, former Secret Service agent who protected Obama says, yeah, I'm really worried for the president. And you look at the history from Tronglos to the Lehigh v. Oswald to Sirhan Sirhan to Hinckley. We have this history of leftists killing or trying to kill conservatives. And this is an ancient history.
00:16:44
Speaker
This is what? This is James Hodgkinson. The same time as that play is going on, murdering this effigy of Trump, we have James Hodgkinson with an SKS Russian rifle go to a baseball field not far from where I'm sitting with a hick list of Republicans and open fire on this charity baseball game rehearsal, almost killing majority whip Steve Scalise.
00:17:10
Speaker
We're not an empire, but are we on the precipice? And if they're talking about the threat of dictatorship, sorry guys, it's too late, because we are living in a quasi-police state right now, because when we were in the White House,
00:17:27
Speaker
We didn't order the FBI to raid Obama's house at gunpoint. We didn't arrest his deputies at Reagan Airport and put them in leg shackles like they did to my colleague Peter Navarro.
00:17:42
Speaker
We didn't go to Planned Parenthood activists homes and arrest them at gunpoint like they did with a pro-life pastor in Pennsylvania. So if the police state is this, you know, shillabat, if it's this specter over the horizon, well, sorry, guys, it's actually arrived and it's the Biden administration that has used police state tactics in America. So, yeah, you know, we've heard this phrase again and again and again. The next election will be the most important in your lifetime. Well, guess what?
00:18:12
Speaker
This time, it's real.
Violence, Polarization, and America's Political Climate
00:18:14
Speaker
I've reflected a lot on the normalization of violence on the left. And you can see this not just at that high level that you've just mentioned. You can see it on the street with kind of loony protesters who are more than happy to punch people on the side of the road.
00:18:30
Speaker
And I keep coming back to this concept of words as violence. And if you accept that words are violence, then it means that you can respond to words with violence. I think that psychological shift on the left is in large part responsible for that phenomena that you're talking about. How do you reflect on this words of violence phenomena that we've seen on the left in recent years?
00:18:55
Speaker
Well, it's all part and parcel of the dehumanization of the other. This is the kind of hobbled status conservatives are in with comparison to the left. Why?
00:19:13
Speaker
Well, what do we believe in? We believe in Western civilization, Judeo-Christian civilization. And more specifically, we believe in the individual. Why? Because we say our rights are a function of us being made in the image of our creator. It's not God. Sorry, it's not a king. It's not a government that gives us rights. We have them inherently unalienable. That's why the word creator, the capital C, is in our founding document here in the United States.
00:19:40
Speaker
And with our attitude to government, it's usually what? Get out of my life. I just want to live my life. The pursuit of happiness, not happiness. We're not guaranteed happiness or equity. We are guaranteed our pursuit of happiness. Well, the left is different, not only to deny the existence of God, they're a collective. They're a hive mind. It's like, I mean, I'm a big sci-fi geek.
00:20:08
Speaker
There's, I love Star Wars and I love Star Trek, but at the end of the day, the greatest Star Trek movie is The Wrath of Khan. And when Spock dies, as he saved the enterprise by irradiating himself, what does he do through that radiation shield with his buddy Captain Kirk? He gives this totally Marxist justification for his sacrifice. He says, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of
00:20:35
Speaker
the few or the one. That, I mean, that's the takes, you know, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelette philosophy of the left. So whether it's that collectivist mindset, or whether it's this dehumanizing of the other, I mean, think about it, Joe Biden is the commander in chief.
00:20:55
Speaker
Within 40 feet of his body every day, 24-7, is a large briefcase that has the nuclear launch codes in it. And he stands bathed in red light outside Independence Hall
00:21:09
Speaker
with Marines flanking him. I mean, totally. I mean, this is like something out of Argentinian junta imagery. And he says, you know, the MAGA extremists are fascists. He labels 74 million people as untermage, as non-humans. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I've seen Antifa, when we came out of the White House for the RNC Congress,
00:21:34
Speaker
The violence that ensued as the guests in the tuxedos were trying to get on buses. I saw one Antifa guy on a bicycle. This is literally outside the gate to the White House. This is 17th Street circling a black Metro car police officer.
00:21:57
Speaker
Like one of these animals in a cage that goes back and forth and screaming the N-word as a white guy to the black cop because he's protecting the guests of the president. When you get to that level,
00:22:13
Speaker
of wanting to burn down St. John the Episcopal Church, one block from the White House in the name of social justice. Let's be clear. There may have been four hours of a little bit of a Barney on Capitol Hill on January 6. By the way, the only people who were killed were Trump supporters, one of them a 14-year Air Force veteran called Ashby Babbitt. But we had months
00:22:40
Speaker
months of riots in the name of social justice in which more than 40 Americans were murdered, most of them black by the way, and for the first time in American history when they got to the White House, first time ever since it was built, the first family had to be evacuated to the nuclear bunker under the White House. We didn't do that. We have, you know, four hours of a little bit of an ajibaji
00:23:06
Speaker
And we have $3 billion worth of damage. 40 people killed. The presidential church almost burned to the ground. So you are absolutely right. Once you say words of violence and the other side is peaceful, but they speak, but you don't like what they say, well, then you can cold cock them from behind with a bicycle lock and kill them. And what are we witnessing? It goes to October the 7th.
00:23:34
Speaker
If Israel has the right to exist, well, that's language I don't like. Therefore, what Hamas did is, is what, quote unquote, resistance. I mean, this is shocking that students on US campuses using the word resistance.
00:23:52
Speaker
to describe putting babies into ovens and decapitating their fathers while they're still living is resistance. I could go on for hours because I did philosophy for my undergrad. When truth becomes plastic,
00:24:10
Speaker
then anything is possible. And I go back, you know, I'm a national security wonk. I go back to the amazing document that George Kennan wrote, the original classified long telegram that became the article, the sources of Soviet conduct. And this is 1946. He's sitting in Moscow and DC asks him, he's the deputy chief of mission and Ambassador Harriman's on vacation. And they say, what's up with Joe? Why is Stalin suddenly not our friend anymore?
00:24:36
Speaker
And Kenan sits down and he writes the best explication of the communist state ever written in 14 pages. And there's one moment that explains everything you need to know about communism and the new left. And he says, you need to understand the concept of truth through the Marxist lens. Truth is that which is of utility to the party to stay in power.
00:25:05
Speaker
Today, the sky can be blue. If we need the sky to be described as red tomorrow, and it is good for the party, the sky will be red. This is how we get to the transgender lunacy of Dylan Malvaney's A Girl, because
00:25:24
Speaker
reasons. All of these things are interconnected, but they ball down to two things, the denial of truth and the need to maintain power. If you understand those two dynamics and how they intersect, you get it all. These double standards that you alluded to in the judiciary amongst policing where different rules seem to apply for different classes of society
00:25:47
Speaker
This is not just an American trend. This is a Western trend, and it all comes back to the increasing fragmentation between, for want of a better term, the liberal elite class and the rest of us. We saw a permutation of that with Brexit. We saw a permutation of that, I think, with the recent Australian voice referendum.
Fragmentation of Liberal Elite vs. Populace
00:26:08
Speaker
Obviously, this is the driving theme behind your book, The Wall for America's Soul.
00:26:12
Speaker
What is driving this fragmentation? And I would add to this question, is that fragmentation in America now just too far gone? Or is there any chance that this country can come back together in a way that say it was in years gone by? So I'm going to push back on that a little bit. I don't think it's generic fragmentation across society. It's a far more focused issue. So literally 20 minutes before we started this, we had a handyman leave our home.
00:26:38
Speaker
because the outlet flew for our dryer was blocked, right? So it's backing up, laundry wasn't getting dry, everything was stinking. And he came in and I immediately, I have a good ear, my wife, my mother spoke nine languages, I'm pretty good myself, and he says hello and I say,
00:26:58
Speaker
Where are you from? That accent's Eastern European. And he says in his sick Eastern European accent, I'm from Virginia. And he refuses to tell me, and I'm thinking, is he Russian? Is he trying to deny that he's Russian because of whatever? And for the next hour, he refuses to tell me, as he is with my wife in the basement fixing the dryer. And then finally, I'm on the phone with my attorney
00:27:22
Speaker
and I hear him talk about his family background with my wife. I stop my call and I say, oh, you'll tell my wife who you are, will you? Okay, turns out he's Latvian, married to a Russian, moved here 20 years ago, and he sees my Trump signs because I've got the booking photograph, the mug shot from Atlanta.
00:27:42
Speaker
that we put on a yard sign at my merch store and it's him that kind of steely stare and it says Trump 2024 and he says I see you're a big supporter. He doesn't even say the name, he says I see you're a big supporter. Yeah, yeah, I worked for the guy and you know we start talking about what's happened to the nation and the economy and he says how everybody's at each other's throats
00:28:07
Speaker
So, you know, I have a connection, national TV host, radio host, former White House advisor, with the guy who just fixed my dryer. We're not that fragmented. What we are is the following. And I'll give full credit to the guy. One of the smartest guys I know, you need to get him on the podcast, is Rich Minniter.
00:28:26
Speaker
Rich Minniter runs his own news agency right now. A former Wall Street Journal investigative journalist wrote seminal works on terrorism, Losing Bin Laden, Mastermind on KSM. And the thing about Rich is you never have a short discussion with Rich. Rich, it's usually multiple cigars till 3 a.m. And we had dinner a few days ago and he said,
00:28:49
Speaker
What we're witnessing from Brexit to Australia, to the truckers in Canada, to Maloney in Italy, to Donald Trump, to even Modi, is the following. It's not a fragmentation of society. It is a very small, unaccountable, unelected elite, and the rest of us. Why can we see the phenomena of Bernie Bros
00:29:19
Speaker
moving over to President Trump. We actually see Bernie Sanders guys who are against dumb wars and so forth sympathetic to President Trump, which is weird because they're very different guys, radical from Vermont and billionaire from Queens. It's because the dichotomous chasm isn't between left and right. The taxonomy of left and right is just jettison. It is gone.
00:29:48
Speaker
What we have is unaccountable elites, whether they're in Brussels or whether they're in a US government. I'll tell you the story. I refuse to use the phrase deep state when I arrived in the White House because I thought it's a little bit cranky, a little bit foil-hatty. Then I go to the NFC meetings.
00:30:09
Speaker
Now, I'm not part of the NSC. I work for the Strategic Initiatives Group. But I have all my clearances, and I get observer status, and I get invited to all the meetings on whatever it is. China policy, how to defeat ISIS, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:30:22
Speaker
And I sit there, and this is in the skiffs. These are in the situation rooms, these secure facilities that are linked by a video teleconference to everywhere. We've got outstations, CIA, DIA, the embassy in Kabul, you name it. And we're discussing the given issue for an hour, hour and a half. I'm sitting there. This is the highest level of decision making in the most powerful nation in the world, short of the cabinet. If we meet at cabinet level, that's different, but these are the guys underneath the cabinet.
00:30:52
Speaker
And I listen, and I listen, and I listen. And for an hour, for 70 minutes, for 80 minutes, none of these people, none of these bureaucrats mentioned the name of the president, or what he said yesterday in Warsaw about ISIS, or what he said yesterday about China and trade relations, not one win. And after I see this five or six times, I say, so screw this.
00:31:21
Speaker
And I put up my hand, and I'm the guy with the funny accent, and I say, hey, guys, do you know what the president said yesterday about ISIS? Do you know what he promised the American people about the border? And then I realized they don't give a toss. These people have been there for 20, 30 years. They're an SES or an SIS senior civil servant. They think a president?
00:31:51
Speaker
A Republican president? I decide the future of America. That's why we have the, you know, Alexander Vindman's. That's why we have the John Kelly's. That's why we have the Nikki Haley's and the, you know, what's the stupid moustachered guy, the John Bolton's.
00:32:08
Speaker
who worked for President Trump and now are saying he's going to be a dictator. It's really weird. Johnny and Nikki, I don't remember anyone putting a gun to your head, forcing you to be a member of the Trump administration. You didn't bitch and moan then about working for a quote unquote dictator, but they now realize what the most important thing about Donald Trump. Nobody owns him. Just like Nigel Farage, these are successful
00:32:35
Speaker
men in the real world who love their countries. He's not owned by the unions. He's not owned by big pharma. He's not owned by the military industrial complex. He's not owned by big oil. If you're not owned by somebody, you can't be controlled.
00:32:53
Speaker
And the people, I saw this, working class Americans at rallies in Youngstown, Ohio, the Rust Belt of America. I'm in an arena with thousands of people who I know were Democrats, who I know their parents were Democrats in the steel mills. And when President Trump comes out on stage, the whole arena explodes with drain the swamp, drain the swamp USA. And I'm thinking,
00:33:20
Speaker
What's the dynamic here? I know what the dynamic is They look at this man and they say he may have his own 747 he may be a self-made billionaire living in a golden tower But just like him if I were flying on Air Force One, I'd be eating Big Macs They relate to this guy. He's genuine and he doesn't give a toss for the people in power
00:33:46
Speaker
who have never had to answer for anything. That's, I'd say, not fragmentation, but a recredescence, a revitalization of demand for representative government in the face of unelected elitists who don't give a shit for you if you're a working man.
Trump vs. the Deep State: 2024 Prospects
00:34:09
Speaker
I think that's well put, but I want to test Trump's both ability and desire to dismantle that deep state to really drain the swamp. You said to the Trigonometry Boys, both friends of the show, that in 2024, you want someone to come in and burn the corrupt shithole to the ground.
00:34:28
Speaker
The probably obvious response is that Trump had four years to burn the shithole to the ground, three pandemic free years. And we're still talking about this. What gives you the confidence that he can do it now when he didn't didn't do it then? Well, look, let's examine the diagnosis of the first four years or the first three years without the pandemic. I said this.
00:34:52
Speaker
back then and I meant it. When we walked into the West Wing in January of 17, in senior positions like myself, so deputy assistant or assistant to the president, senior level positions, they were less than 20 of us who were MAGA and America first. We had no bench. Why would the president have a bench? He's a businessman from New York.
00:35:19
Speaker
Even Steve Bannon admitted using this phrase to an article for I don't know some scum rag like what vanity fair or something He said we had 4,000 presidential positions to fill and a month in we realized we didn't have anybody so he says quote we did we right tonight did a drug deal with the GOP and
00:35:40
Speaker
for the bodies, which meant what? We needed people with a pulse who were breathing. We didn't have a bench. And so the rhino schlep, the bushies and everybody else flooded into those positions. That was a conscious decision. And it was a bad decision. But what else are we going to do? We've inherited this insane National Security Council. So it was so bloated under Obama. Think of this. The National Security Council under Eisenhower was 25 people.
00:36:09
Speaker
That was a pretty hot time in history, the 1950s. Under Reagan, the height of the Cold War, it was 75 people. When we came in, the Obama NSC was 420 people. That's insane. And 90% of them are Democrats. So mistakes were made, but let me say this, and this isn't to make excuses. The fact that President Trump achieved what he achieved
00:36:35
Speaker
despite active sabotage at the highest level, even the cabinet level, is stunning. ISIS destroyed. The border secured. Biggest stock market in history. Now, can we do it again? Look, I'm not going to go into details, but I was with the president a couple of weeks ago in Mar-a-Lago, and the reason I requested the meeting was because of this.
00:36:58
Speaker
Because wherever you stand on the conservative spectrum, I don't care what your pet rock is, whether your issue is freedom of speech, immigration, the economy, the Second Amendment, pro-life, it doesn't really matter what your priority is. If we don't get the personnel piece right, forget about it. I mean, Reagan was right. Personnel is policy. So I had a plan for how to deal with this in the first administration. Steve shot it down.
00:37:27
Speaker
Can we do it in the second administration? To be brutal, I don't know. But to leverage what I said to the trigonometry guys, we need somebody with double-fisted flamethrowers to come into this stinking cesspit and burn the corruption to the ground. And the only person who has a chance is my former boss. I don't know if he can do it given the
00:37:55
Speaker
the the the orgy and stable level of corruption we're talking about but i damn well know it's not nicky haley chris christie doug berman or ron desantis so the only guy who has a shot is my former boss.
Trump's Ideology and Appeal
00:38:11
Speaker
Couple things pick up on that you mentioned bannon how much of the trump ideology comes from trump and how much of it comes from people like you and stay bannon.
00:38:19
Speaker
What extent is Trump the actor and what extent is he actually the thinker? Great question. He is 101% the actor, but ironically, or paradoxically,
00:38:33
Speaker
He can't be put into an ideological box. So this is the unique thing about President Trump, that he won. Why? Not because he painted this very fine ideological picture of what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century and what the role is of America. No, he won because of one reason. The nation was broken.
00:38:56
Speaker
And he said, I'm going to fix it. And tens of millions of people said, huh, he's a businessman. Maybe he can fix it. And most important of all, and this is why I agreed to work for him in that meeting in Trump Tower. Look, not my style. His style is very different from mine.
00:39:12
Speaker
But within about four nanoseconds, I realized two things about the man sitting across the table from me. Number one, he hates political correctness with a passion. And number two, he loves America. And I think it's that authentic, truth-telling, anti-political correctness and love of America that got him elected. It's not because he fitted into some neat taxonomy of neoliberal, neocon, paleocon, none of that. He doesn't have an ideology.
00:39:41
Speaker
unless...
00:39:43
Speaker
you can call loving America an ideology, because it's really that simple. He said, no more stupid wars, fix the border, fix the economy. That's not an ideology. And you know what? I like that. I spent 20 years studying ideology. And I'll give full credit to my friend Robert Riley, who wrote the best book on modern Islam. And Rob made this throwaway line once in the conversation, said, we don't have ideologies if we're conservatives.
00:40:12
Speaker
we have the truth because an ideology is a lens through which you interpret reality. And I go, whoa, yeah, it is. And I started using that in my teaching on jihadism and communism. An ideology is a framework, is a political matrix through which you interpret objective inputs.
00:40:41
Speaker
A conservative doesn't have a political overlay. I mean, look at what the word is, to conserve. To conserve what? To conserve that which we know to be true over a millennia. Family, the need for families and families as the building block of society isn't some political permutation of some guy in a university. It's just a fact of life.
00:41:09
Speaker
The idea that you should have a father and a mother and a man is a man and a woman is a woman and that will never change. These are ideological
00:41:20
Speaker
interpretations, they're the truth. So for President Trump, he doesn't have this filter of whatever taxonomy of ideology is going to fit into. It's MAGA. Do you believe in America? Do you think it's great? Okay, vote for me. Now, I said this to my buddies, you know, Chris Buskirk and others who have, you know, the American Greatness website and what is this that the Natcons or whatever that in the first four years we had this moment.
Vivek's Potential Role in Politics
00:41:49
Speaker
that was well exploited under Reagan, where you win a political election and then the 80-pound brains sit down and they have the conferences and they say, okay, what does it mean to be a Reagan conservative? And I wanted the thinkers on our side to sit down and say, we won, we beat Hillary, let's do some ideological heavy thing, let's sit down and define MAGA in a little bit more detail. And we never really got around to it.
00:42:20
Speaker
Few shorter takes. What's Vivek's game plan? He's not going to win the presidency. What's he doing there? Look, it should become a political actor.
00:42:31
Speaker
So whether it's 2028 or whether it's in a second Trump administration, I've had him on my radio show numerous times. I've met him. He's a smart guy. He's the only guy on the platform who's taking it to the, you know, the corrupt nicks like Haley and Christie. And I said to him quite, you know, I think day one after he announced and he came on my show, I said, dude, you're never going to win.
00:42:52
Speaker
But I could see you as the Jared Kushner of a second Trump term, because after what they did to him, after what the scumbags did to him and his wife, I don't think Jared's coming back. But it would be great to have a really successful tech, biotech CEO.
00:43:08
Speaker
in the administration as some kind of floating innovation person like Jared was so you know he look he's a he's a big character he's not going anywhere he can fund his own campaign so either he's going to run in 28 against Ron or we'll see him in the Trump cabinet if God willing we do our part.
00:43:27
Speaker
On Ron, you would have to say that, by and large, most of, in terms of the big issues, Trump and DeSantis would be aligned. If you take a step back, at least compared to Democrats, Trump has been scathing of DeSantis at times. You have been disabling of DeSantis at times.
Critique of Ron DeSantis: Honor and Strategy
00:43:43
Speaker
I want to know why the level of hostility, I guess, is, is, and the tone towards DeSantis, even if you don't think he's the best candidate, taking quite a pugilistic tone towards DeSantis.
00:43:55
Speaker
honor. It really boils down to honor, which I know, you know, involving politics, you want a friend in DC, you should buy a dog. But so there's a big vellum document.
00:44:07
Speaker
in my living room, very large frame document. And it is my political commissioning document from the president, very old school, written in cursive with my name, with the signature of the president and the presidential seal. And it names me as deputy assistant to the president. For me, I wasn't press gang. I didn't take the King's shilling. I volunteered to do that. And that is a big deal for me. And the idea
00:44:35
Speaker
like some other people who were issued that document, they trashed the man that they worked for or they turned their back on him. You're worse than pond scum. I mean, you really are. When you volunteer like Bolton did or like Haley did or like Kelly did or like Mathis did, you're at the highest, it's the highest honor in the world because he's elected
00:45:00
Speaker
The people made him president. You're invited. You don't have to compete in an election. You're invited to serve the man chosen by your fellow Americans to be their leader. So for me, honor is important.
00:45:16
Speaker
Look, Ron was 16 points behind the Secretary of Ag in the primaries. He was never going to be governor, and then President Trump endorsed him and he wins. So there's an honor deficit there.
00:45:31
Speaker
be successful. Why? Because I've used the analogy before. He's the mini me to Donald Trump. He's only successful in Florida because he ate President Trump's policies, whether it's cultural, cancel culture, business, you name it. It's because he replicated Trump. And now now he wants to say that he's better than Trump. And you know, when I realize this man has no honor, the weekend the Alvin Bragg indictments from New York leaked and it explodes.
00:46:02
Speaker
The Monday after the leak, Ron is giving some press conference on, I don't know, education or cyber or something. And in the Q&A, a reporter asks about the indictments against the man who made him governor. And this little nobody makes a joke about hush money for porn stars. Not once, but twice. I don't know about hush money for porn stars.
00:46:31
Speaker
I mean, seriously, that's your comment. And then he says, I'm too busy being the governor of Florida. I'm not going to get involved. Hey, dickhead, get a map. Do you know where Mar-a-Lago is? It's in Florida. So you're not going to get involved in a political persecution of a resident of the state of which you are the governor and the most damning of all. He says, I'm not going to get involved.
00:46:58
Speaker
What's his career background before President Trump made him governor and before he ended up in Congress? He was a jag. He was a military prosecutor in the Navy. And for a former prosecutor not to have an opinion on the political prosecution,
00:47:19
Speaker
of the man who was the president, is the leader of the opposition, and facilitated his right to the governorship, he has no honor. I'm sorry. And that's why he deserves every lambasting he is receiving. And on top of that, just mechanically,
00:47:38
Speaker
His campaign will be taught at business schools across the world as the case study of the most self-destructive campaign in history for the presidency. He hired all of these influencers, some of whom are former friends of mine, who were utter Trumpsters. I mean level 11 Trumpsters. And who do they attack on social media?
00:48:00
Speaker
not Biden, not Christie, not Haley, they attack us. They attack MAGA voters. And you're thinking, hang on, you're the mini me of MAGA for Florida. And you're attacking people like me and Trump voters. You're just stupid. That's why he deserves every criticism that we have slung at him. I've got my promo teaser for the episode. Thank you very much.
00:48:28
Speaker
Final question said, predictions for 2024 in
The Unpredictability of 2024 Elections
00:48:31
Speaker
American politics. Let's take it as read the prediction. Number one is that you think Trump will win the presidency. What other predictions do you have for 2024?
00:48:37
Speaker
Well, I don't think I ideally hope so. You know, God willing, if we do our part, because the most important thing is free and fair elections. We can't have 81 million mail out ballots. We can't have the governor of Virginia like Northam say we will not verify signatures. Hang on. What is the only reason you're not going to verify a signature on anything? It's fraud. So, you know, God willing, he will win. What's the other question? Your other predictions for American politics in 2024?
00:49:06
Speaker
I'm not going to cop out of this one. Well, I am, but I'm going to give you a reason why. Number one, predictions are a mug's game because nobody ever holds you to them. Nobody plays black your prediction a year later and said, oh, Gorka, you said this. I could say whatever I want. But number two, I know what
00:49:28
Speaker
our side's going to do, or at least I can give you the general shape of what we're going to do. But the trouble with predicting the future is I cannot channel insanity. And to predict the future, I have to channel the left. And I'm sorry. I mean, my thing is that I eat, drink, and sleep strategy. That's the thing. It's a bit nerdy, but I'm excited about strategy. From Thucydides to Trump, it's my thing. We are dealing, the adversary isn't
00:49:59
Speaker
Strategic in any sense of the word that a strategic look look at the look at the indictments If you're a strategic actor who lives in the real world you indict the president once He gains popularity and more donations you indict him a second time He's even more popular and even more donations if you're a strategic actor you say Maybe that's a bad idea. Not only do they indict him a third time they indict him a fourth time and a fifth time that's
00:50:29
Speaker
That's non-rational. That is a-strategic. You are making him stronger. And also at the same time, they're really dumb. How do I know that? They think that they can neutralize his victory by getting him arrested and imprisoned.
00:50:48
Speaker
These people are evil scum, but they're also really imbecilic. I mean, they're clinical morons. Why? I guess nobody in the Democrat Party, thank you, has read the Constitution. The Constitution is quite explicit as to who can be the president. You have to be in your late 30s, you have to be a natural born citizen, and you have to be continuously resident in America for the last 14 years. Doesn't say you can't be a felon.
00:51:14
Speaker
It's very interesting. It doesn't say you can't be sitting in a prison cell and then pardon yourself three minutes after the inauguration. These people are so stupid. They're using police state tactics, which constitutionally have no actual effect on the likelihood of him becoming president. So, you know, I can't predict 2024 because I can't predict what the left will do, but I'll predict this for you. If you thought the last three years were insane, buckle up.
00:51:45
Speaker
I myself cannot wait. We will get you back onto the pod to chat about it in 2024. So you've always been one of my favorite political commentators. We didn't even get a chance to talk about the middle East, but I was strongly recommend to everyone your book, Defeating Jihad, which unfortunately is more relevant than ever just by coming out in 2016. Also the war for America's soul is another mandatory one for the Christmas stockings linked to your sub stack and social media pages are in the show notes. This has been a thrill for me, mate. Thank you very much for coming on Australia.
00:52:14
Speaker
Cheers, any time, I really enjoyed it and it's always a pleasure when people ask good questions. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.