Outspoken Trump defender out of a job

WASHINGTON — Sebastian Gorka, an outspoken adviser to President Trump, is no longer working at the White House, a senior administration official said Friday.

The official said the president’s chief of staff, John Kelly, had telegraphed his lack of interest in keeping Gorka over the past week in internal discussions.

Gorka, who had advised the president on national security, demonstrated a penchant for controversy. He memorably declared that “the alpha males are back” as an assertion of the distance between the Obama administration and the current one.

He has also been a vocal defender of the Trump administration’s efforts to temporarily ban travel from some predominantly Muslim countries; he has said violence is a fundamental part of Islam and emanates from the language of the Quran. His hard-line views on Islam have prompted his critics to accuse him of Islamophobia.

Gorka, 46, who has also been accused of having links to far-right groups in Europe, declined to discuss the reasons for leaving the White House, but pointed toward excerpts from his resignation letter that were posted Friday by The Federalist website, the Associated Press reported.

Gorka wrote that “the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months.”

Gorka is a former editor at Breitbart News, a rightwing website and a friend of Steve Bannon. Bannon, who was until last week Trump’s chief strategist, has since returned to Breitbart News.