Former Trump foreign policy advisor Sebastian Gorka came to Grain Valley on Saturday to speak at a private fundraiser for U.S. Senate candidate Tony Monetti.
Up first, Monetti wowed the crowd with his impassioned conservative message. A Brooklyn native and a former B-2 pilot, retired Lt. Col. Monetti faces an uphill battle against establishment candidate Josh Hawley, but his “outsider” message has been resonating with Missouri Republicans and with Gorka as well.
Born in England to Hungarian parents. Gorka absorbed his conservatism, as he said, “through his mother’s milk.” His father was an anti-communist activist who was imprisoned and tortured by the Communist regime before he was freed in 1956 Hungarian uprising.
Now an American citizen, Gorka was summoned to Trump tower early in the campaign to meet with the future president. What impressed Gorka from the beginning was Trump’s straightforwardness. “The man you see on TV,” said Gorka, “is the man you meet behind closed doors.”
A military and intelligence analyst, Gorka served as a deputy assistant before leaving in the Steve Bannon shakeout. Despite his forced departure, Gorka speaks of Trump in unforced superlatives. He considers the president the “most instinctive” person he has ever met in politics and the one man he thinks capable of confronting what he calls “the permanent state.”
In the question and answer session, Gorka said he always believed Trump would win, in no small part because he could not imagine the alternative. He described a Hillary Clinton administration in nearly apocalyptic terms, seeing it as “the end of everything we believe in,” starting with the Supreme Court.
Gorka also expressed much sympathy for the beleagured attorney general Jeff Sessions. He described the Department of Justice as the most entrenched and ideological of all bureaucracies in the permanent state and the one that takes the most patience to unravel.
As a child of immigrants to England and as a “legal” immigrant to the United States, Gorka identifies with Monetti on that level. He is also a strong believer that the political system needs more non-politicians like Monetti and like Donald Trump.