Steve Bannon camp still has influence with Trump team
‘We left the building but we did not leave the president,’ says controversial ex-White House staffer during Israel visit
The Steve Bannon camp still has sway with US President Donald Trump, former White House senior staffer Sebastian Gorka told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
“The president remains loyal to those who served him well. We left the building, we did not leave Trump,” explained Gorka on the sidelines of IDC Herzliya’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism conference.
Bannon was a Trump co-campaign manager and a chief White House strategist who was recently forced out after a prolonged battle with others in the Trump administration considered to be more moderate. Gorka, who worked for Bannon, resigned shortly thereafter.
Gorka said that three weeks ago, when he resigned from the Trump administration, was when he felt that Trump’s new Afghanistan policy and other policies contradicted the “Make America Great Again” and “America First” ideologies, but that he would “still support Trump from the outside.”
He said that Trump called him the day after he resigned and “assured me that he will stay on with his original agenda.”
In that spirit, Gorka predicted that “the current state of affairs” in which competing ideologies have grown in power within the administration “is temporary, and very soon the president will realize he is not being well served by his senior staff.”
He said that once that occurs, Trump will ask “people associated with his ideology to come back,” which could include advisers like ex-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, from whom Trump never stopped regularly taking advice.
While acknowledging that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly had brought about “a drastic change in the way things are done inside the White House,” Gorka implied that on ideology and even matters of Trumpian-style, Kelly would need to buy into Trump to have lasting influence.
Gorka was pressed on how Trump could continue to claim the pro-Israel mantle, after many Israelis thought he had thrown Israeli security interests under the bus in a Syria cease-fire deal.
Israel issued a rare public rebuke of the Trump deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as the deal did not include provisions to keep Iran off the Syrian side of the Golan border. That is an issue of major concern, since it could give Iran a new point from which to threaten the country.
Gorka said unequivocally, “No one has thrown anyone under the bus. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel as our strongest ally in the region.”
Explaining further, he said, “The president’s priority was simply to stop the bloodshed. A political resolution, the future of Assad and the disposition of Iranian forces” were all issues the US would still attend to, even if they were not part of the initial deal.
“The bottom line is, this is the most pro-Israeli administration, not just in modern times but since 1776,” he said.
When it was noted that a
favorable tone toward Israel did not cure Israel’s concrete security concerns, Gorka said – as a private individual – he would note that Trump was still running into interference on foreign affairs from the bureaucratic state.
“Trump is the quintessential disruptor,” he said, but added that “even a disruptor fighting 15, 20 years of institutional momentum” faces “massive inertia” in trying to fix “20 years of disastrous foreign policy.”
Honing in on how disturbed the Jewish community was about Trump’s reaction to recent white supremacist violence and incitement in Charlottesville, Virginia, he “rejected new labels.”
Gorka said that Trump “unequivocally condemned Nazis, antisemites and fascists,” and pointed out that he has Jewish grandchildren.
He was asked how any of that absolved the president from making what many viewed as a false equivalence between violent white supremacist actions in Charlottesville and the nonviolent activism of some leftwing activists there.
Gorka responded that this obscured Trump’s broader point that the media focuses endlessly on right-wing violence but underplays left-wing violence – giving James Hodgkinson, who attacked Republican congressmen, and a leftwing Oregon man who knifed multiple people, as examples.
Later, Gorka spoke at the conference itself, saying he does not believe the US is winning the war on terrorism.
His argument was twofold. On one hand, he said, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have focused too heavily on the physical aspect of terrorism instead of focusing on undermining the ideology of those they seek to defeat. Trump’s strategy, Gorka said, is one of obliteration of ISIS, but added this also does not address the bigger issue.
On the other hand, he said that the US – like Israel and other Western countries – has not done enough to de-incentivize terrorists.
By focusing on killing low-level, lone-wolf terrorists, they are not attacking the root of the problem, according to Gorka’s model.
The current administration must attack the “center of gravity” of terrorist organizations, he said, which he described as the people with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.
He did note that the US is bound by the First Amendment, and that effectively removing content from social media sites would be stifling freedoms of speech and expression. However, he suggested that threats of national security outweigh the “videos on YouTube that seek to kill you and your children.” •