One of P.G. Wodehouse’s best-known characters, after Jeeves and Wooster, is Roderick Spode: fascist leader and secret purveyor of fine ladies’ undergarments. Spode is the head of the “Black Shorts” – all the black shirts having been taken – a bombastic, merciless bully and quivering tower of self-regard, magnificent in his absurdity. Spode was introduced to us in 1938, yet he lives still. Today, he is none other than President Trump’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council, Dr. Sebastian Gorka.
The British accent, the booming voice…Spode/Gorka was speaking to journalists the other day when he called critics of the Iran war “testicularly challenged.” Opposing the bombing was a “low-T [testosterone] approach to threats to the United States,” he said. He was answering a question from the Daily Caller, the conservative website, which is not automatically hostile to the Trump White House. Its journalist, nonplussed, asked: “Is this really who we have in the administration right now?”
His ‘everyday carry’ includes two pistol, two flashlights, a Hissatsu combat knife and a tourniquet
Well, yes, it is. As Gorka once declared, “the alpha males are back” in the White House. Should there be any doubts about his own T-levels, Gorka drives a Mustang with the vanity plate “Art of War” and poses on X with his many weapons. For $1,800 you can buy a .45 with Gorka’s face, and Trump’s, engraved on the grip. He told Recoil magazine that his “everyday carry” includes two pistols – a Glock and a Smith & Wesson 9mm – two flashlights, a Hissatsu combat knife and a tourniquet he can apply “with one hand” (along with a copy of the US Constitution).
So Gorka can personally take down any terrorists who cross his path. He has also just published the United States Counterterrorism Strategy, after more than a year of promising this important document was “imminent.” Summed up, the strategy is: “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.” Trump tweeted this phrase days into his second term, after ordering an air strike against an ISIS leader in Somalia. As Gorka tells it (whenever he gets the chance), he and the national security advisor at the time, Mike Waltz, walked into the Oval Office and gave Trump satellite photos of the cave complex where the man was hiding.
“The President goes: ‘What do you mean we’ve been watching him? Biden’s been watching him? Kill him.’ He gets out his black Sharpie pen, the classic, iconic pen, and there’s a box on the operational orders. He ticks the ‘Go’ box. He hands it off to us. The whole meeting was maybe 180 seconds.”
Among the many national security professionals who consider Gorka a buffoon is Michael Smith, a well-known expert on jihadist terrorism. The Somalia story shows Gorka dropping off the intelligence community’s mail at the Oval Office, according to Smith: “I’m sure that any intern could have passed that information along.” The old Trump had wanted to get the US out of “shithole countries” like Somalia, happy to let ISIS or al-Qaeda take over. The new Trump likes bombing. But Gorka had no influence over these decisions: he was a counterterrorism enthusiast, not a counterterrorism expert. Still, Smith added: “It is dangerous to have somebody like this who really does not know what they’re talking about.”
Gorka is a faithful echo of his master’s voice. The Somali jihadists were “vaporized” into “a cloud of red mist.” They got “eternal justice” from the Trump administration’s “hammers of hell.” 180 seconds. Done. In 15 months, 860 terrorists killed. Gorka has even produced merch to celebrate: his staff wear lanyards that say “WWFY&WWKY” [We Will Find You and We Will Kill You]. This was not an original Trump line – the President has no pretenses to being an original thinker – it was lifted from the Liam Neeson film Taken. Neeson’s character is a vigilante killing his way through Paris to rescue his daughter, operating outside the law. So WWFY&WWKY is pure Trump – rules, what rules? – but it’s also apparently the official counterterrorism doctrine of the United States government.
Perhaps even ISIS terrorists – or, more to the point, suspected ISIS terrorists – deserve more than three minutes of what passes for due process at the Trump White House. True, this is the last of many steps, the very top of the kill chain. But Dr. Gorka, on the National Security Council and a deputy assistant to the President, is near the top of that chain. He has said he wants strikes to be carried out within 72 hours of a target being identified. That might be the “justice” that terrorists deserve, but mistakes happen when you move fast.
Terrorists do not conveniently separate themselves from civilians; they often live in villages, not barracks. President Trump said the Somalia ISIS strike did not kill innocents. But he has scrapped the Pentagon office that worked to cut civilian casualties. The British monitoring group Airwars says that last year in two days of strikes against the Houthis in Yemen – also designated as terrorists – US forces killed half as many civilians as in a year of strikes under the Biden administration. Last April, the US accidentally bombed a detention center for African migrants in Yemen, killing 68 of them but, according to Amnesty International, zero combatants.
Then there’s the language. Gorka says his targets are “human filth.” They are “obliterated” and their bodies stacked “like cordwood.” There is something unseemly about this. It is not how the military themselves talk, certainly not in public, let alone from a White House podium. Professional soldiers are circumspect about killing; Gorka revels in it. He boasts on X about hanging out at “Bragg” with the Green Berets. A source familiar with that world told me the real “snake-eaters” – the special forces – “hold Gorka in contempt.”
Joe Kent was a snake-eater, a decorated special forces veteran and Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, until he resigned over the Iran war. Gorka, a former part-time soldier in the British army reserves, left him a voicemail: “You are an utter disgrace to the uniform you once wore… good riddance to you.” Kent has thought deeply about terrorism, not least because his first wife, a Navy special operations intelligence officer, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in Syria. Gorka attacked him for mentioning her in his resignation letter.
Kent’s letter exposes the rift at the heart of US counterterrorism policy and within the MAGA movement. He wrote: “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel.” Kent – and the version of Donald Trump that once called the 2003 invasion of Iraq a “big fat mistake” – would have stayed out of Israel’s war with Iran. The war hawks say: “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” It is the same specious argument that got us into Iraq.
Kent argued that foreign wars make us less safe. Iran has been a sophisticated state sponsor of terrorism for decades. It could hurt the US at home and abroad. To which Dr. Gorka would say: “Bring it on.” He believes we are in a fight to the death against radical Islam in all its forms: “This is a battle for our civilization.” And he would never criticize Israel. After the October 7 attacks by Palestinian gunmen, he filmed a video selfie with a message for Israel’s Prime Minister: “Kill every single one of them. God bless Israel. God bless Judeo-Christian civilization.”
Gorka, then, is not an anti-Semite, a charge that has been falsely leveled against him. But does he have Spode-like fascist tendencies? He has not been seen out and about in Washington wearing a pair of Black Shorts, but he did, famously, appear at a 2017 inauguration ball with the medal of Vitézi Rend, the Hungarian order founded by Hitler’s ally, Admiral Horthy. Gorka is a naturalized US citizen born in London in 1970 to Hungarian parents. The medal was in honor of his father and his ancestral homeland, he explained, not Vitézi Rend’s fascist past. Someone who has spent many hours in conversation with Gorka over the years told me: “He’s not a fascist, exactly… more fascist curious.”
Gorka’s doctorate may be slightly dubious (and he has sold pain pills on television to people who may have confused him with a medical doctor). But he has the main qualification for serving in the Trump White House: extreme obsequiousness. He has raised public brown-nosing to a fine art. On X, he posts images of Trump with the caption: “There is no one like this man.”
Gorka’s Führerprinzip may make him as much Dr. Strangelove as Spode. Spode aspired to be the nation’s leader, whereas Strangelove is happy as the loyal servant. Peter Sellers’s character was excited over the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. Gorka’s bloodlust is channeled – more modestly – through what he calls the US military’s “exquisite” ability to “find, fix and finish” America’s enemies.
The enemies list is defined by the US Counterterrorism Strategy, which Gorka calls “my life’s work.” There are ISIS and al-Qaeda, as you would expect, the Houthis, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Palestinian militants, Venezuelan drug smugglers and the Mexican cartels. There is also a list of domestic enemies: violent left-wing extremists, radical transgender activists, and Antifa.
As long as Gorka has Trump’s ear, he has influence over the most lethal war machine in human history
Breitbart asked Gorka if there was a right-wing terror threat. No, Gorka said, and then weirdly brought up Tucker Carlson, saying he was “not sure” Carlson was even part of the conservative movement, having “lauded” Sharia law (which is not true). Authoritarians, or those with authoritarian tendencies, like to label their opponents as terrorists. Perhaps Carlson should be worried.
I get an email from Dr. Gorka. He’s heard I’m writing a piece about him. It’s from his official White House account and this is the middle of the day. I am surprised he has the time to speak to me – surely it’s busy on the National Security Council? – but pleased to get the chance to talk about US counterterrorism policy. He ignores my earnest questions. Instead, he calls our editor, Freddy Gray, a “risible little twerp” and “a ball-less wonder.” Such rancor is out of all proportion to the gentle fun The Spectator has had in pricking his pomposity in the past, but Gorka is notorious for his feuds.
This is another reason why, as a West Wing insider told me, Gorka is not regarded as a serious figure by his colleagues. He was “a very vain person who likes to leak to the press incessantly,” but the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had shut down the “worst elements of his nature.” My informant told me Gorka was not involved in targeting terrorists; not even “super-involved” in any decisions about ISIS. Officials worked around him or simply ignored him.
All well and good, you might think. Gorka is clearly at his most content in front of a TV camera. Much of what he does is performative. But as long as the doctor has President Trump’s ear – however sporadically – he has some influence over the most lethal war machine in human history, the US military. Wodehouse’s Black Shorts were a joke because they never marched into government. If Spode/Gorka ever gets real power, the joke will stop being funny.
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