Sebastian Gorka, until recently a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, has predicted that Trump will conduct an imminent cull of his White House team in order to bring back people more beholden to the president’s original agenda.
Gorka was ousted from the White House last month, just days after his former Breitbart News colleague Steve Bannon met a similar fate as part of a shakeup in the wake of John Kelly’s arrival as Trump’s chief of staff. Since coming on board at the end of July, Kelly, a former general, has sought to cut out the numerous voices competing for the president’s attention, restricting access to those who, like Bannon, once regularly dropped by the Oval Office.
Reports have since described Trump as isolated within the West Wing. And Gorka, a self-styled counter-terrorism expert who earned Trump’s admiration with his combative defense of the president in interviews, does not believe the current setup will continue for much longer.
“The president has a very interesting management style,” Gorka told Newsweek Thursday. “He’s comfortable with unusually high levels of creative chaos beneath him because he sees who’s the best fighter and who makes the best argument. But if he feels he’s being poorly served by his lieutenants he allows that frustration to increase until he gets to a point where he takes decisive action. I predict he will take decisive action to get those people around him who are not serving his original platform out of the building and that’s just how he works. I predict that there will be some firings in the near future that come from the president himself when he realizes just how much he needs the old team to be around him.”
As for who those working against the president’s agenda are, Gorka opted not to name names. He stressed that the pushback to Trump’s plans to “Make America Great Again” began long before Kelly came on board and as soon as the political outsider and his small team of allies entered the White House in what he termed “the largest hostile in modern history.”
Since his departure, Bannon has gone back to work at Breitbart, where he claims he will be a “wingman” for Trump’s agenda. Meanwhile, Gorka this week signed up to be chief strategist for pro-Trump super PAC the MAGA Coalition. His first role for the organization will, in a bizarre twist, come this week when campaigning for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, the opponent of Trump-backed establishment-candidate Luther Strange.
Gorka does not attach much significance to Trump’s public stance in the Senate race and said, ultimately, he and Trump are very much on the same page.
“This is very unfortunate but it’s a temporary state of affairs,” Gorka said about the recent changes at the White House. “And people like myself are now going to go to the outside to support the president from the outside, that’s why Steve is doing what he’s doing, that’s why I joined the MAGA Coalition. It’s just a function of the swamp protecting itself but eventually they will lose because the president is a fighter and he will realize that sooner or later he is not being well served by the anti-MAGA voices and the RINO establishment that have encircled him. And he will make some strident changes.”
Since leaving the White House, Bannon has said he still talks regularly to Trump, a claim that the White House has attempted to pour cold water on. Gorka, too, hinted that, while he is no longer officially working alongside the president, he and others still had Trump’s ear.
“Does anybody really think the president doesn’t reach out to people who he trusts,” he said. “The president, apart from being a patriot and a pragmatist, is very loyal to people who are loyal to him, let me just leave it at that.”
Gorka said he and Bannon were working to set an agenda that would shape U.S. politics well into the next decade.
“I’m not making any predictions about Steve and myself,” he said. “Whether or not Steve goes back or I go back—this is the long game, we’re in this for eight years and then eight years of President Pence—I guarantee you people associated with the original campaign will be coming back in or the president will be leaning upon them more than ever.”