The War for America's Soul Read online

  BONUS CHAPTER SIXSTRAIGHT ANSWERS TO POPULAR QUESTIONS

  Even before I joined the Trump Administration, I was used to speaking to audiences across the nation. Part of that was my day job, lecturing to our military and the law enforcement and intelligence communities on the current national security threats we face, and how to understand our enemies, and how to defeat them. But since leaving the White House and launching my national radio show, AMERICA First, I have travelled far and wide to speak to audiences comprised more of your average patriots, people who want to hear about my time in the White House, what my old boss “is really like,” and how we will defeat the increasingly radical scourge that is today’s Democrat party.

  Nevertheless, wherever I may be, or whoever is in the audience—and whatever topic the hosts may have given me to speak on—the best part of any event is answering the questions I get from the crowd. It’s during the question and answer segment that you find out what people truly care about, what they are most worried about, where they see us heading as a nation, and what advice or words of encouragement they are most eager to hear.

  However, I always feel as if I end up shortchanging my fellow Americans since we always run out of time before we run out of questions. Not anymore!

  On the next few pages, before you get to my exclusive interview with President Trump, I have collected questions that I have received but never had the chance to address from various engagements, as well as from my AMERICA First listeners. Here are the answers to the questions you’ve always wanted me to answer.

  Q: Why did you leave the White House?

  GORKA I’m always surprised when people ask me this question—especially conservatives, because it’s not a secret. When I resigned, my letter of resignation to the president was published in the press. You can read the full text of it at Breitbart.com. But, in a nutshell, the story is very simple: my job as a White House strategist had essentially been preempted by the president’s top national security adviser. I did not work in the National Security Council, I worked in the office of the Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, in the White House. But once H. R. McMaster replaced General Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser, my work in the White House became more and more difficult. McMaster clearly did not like me, boxed me out of key decisions, and did not invite me to important meetings. When Steve Bannon resigned in August 2017, I was left in this twilight zone of staying on staff without my immediate boss, doing the odd media hit for the president, and picking up a sizable taxpayer-funded paycheck whilst being undermined by the national security adviser. I decided that it would be immoral to maintain a position where I could no longer be an effective strategist for the president. So, in my letter to President Trump, I made it clear that certain forces not loyal to the “Make America Great Again” agenda were in ascendance in the White House, and, as such, I could more effectively serve the MAGA agenda and the president on the outside of the building—and that is exactly what I’ve been doing since I left, whether it’s with my media appearances, my books, or my new radio show, AMERICA First, there is a need to be able to provide the president with full-throated support from the outside, and that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve spoken to him since I left, and he appreciates it and he, in fact, has told me that I am more effective without the bureaucrats hanging around my neck.

  Fortunately, H. R. McMaster has left, and John Bolton is his replacement—which is very good news for America.

  Who knows what the future holds, but right now I’m having far too much fun on the outside of government to think of going back.

  Q: What was the medal of your father’s that was used as a way to attack you in the press?

  GORKA: This is very important question. My father was put in prison by the Communists at the age of twenty, with a life sentence for being an anti-Communist. Prior to that, as a child, he had lived under and suffered through the fascist occupation of Hungary and had in fact protected Jewish schoolmates from abuse by the occupational German forces. As a result, his family was recognized for their support of the Jewish community in Budapest.

  Once he survived the torture, the solitary confinement, and all the other aspects of being a political prisoner in a Communist dictatorship, he was liberated after six years in prison during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and escaped to the West with the seventeen-year-old daughter of a fellow political prisoner. They literally crawled across a minefield into Austria, and they became refugees and finally ended up in the United Kingdom, where they were married, and eventually I was born.

  In the late 1970s, the dissidents, the anti-Communists who had escaped Hungary created a revitalized version of the Vitez chivalric order to recognize the courage of those who had resisted fascism and communism, and my father was awarded membership in that order in 1979. On special occasions, such as the inauguration ball, I wear that medal in memory of my parents’ heroism. That medal has been used to smear me because a member of the earlier Vitez chivalric order had been connected to the fascist takeover of Hungary. It’s guilt by association and ignores the fact that members of the original Vitez order have been recognized by Yad Vashem in Israel for saving members of the Jewish community in Hungary. But, again, for the media, it’s not about truth. It’s about narrative. It’s about attacking people who are associated with President Trump. But I still have that medal, and I am proud of what it represents in terms of my parents’ resistance to Nazis and Communists, and I will remain proud of it.

  Q: Are there people in the Trump Administration who conspire against him?

  GORKA: Well, conspiracy connotes some kind of organized group. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s evidence of that. But, I will tell you from my own experience and the experience of individuals in the Trump administration who are political appointees, yes, there are people in the administration, civil servants and political appointees, who are undermining the president and his agenda on a daily basis.

  There are people from the Obama administration still in place—and that is a very serious problem. Bureaucrats who are sympathetic to the globalizing, post-modern, relativist policies and ideologies of the Left and the radical Left, are working every day to undermine the president—making it all the more remarkable that he has achieved as much as he has.

  I was speaking in front of a group of leaders of conservative organizations, just after the midterm elections in 2018, and they asked me, “What should we say to the president if we see him? What’s the priority?” And I was very clear with them: he needs to hire the right people; and you should advise him who those people are. I said it doesn’t matter whether the most important topic to you is the Second Amendment, Freedom of Speech, Pro-Life issues, tax reform, or de-regulation—no good things will happen if you don’t get the first question right, and that’s the question of personnel.

  There’s a saying in Washington, D.C.: “Personnel is policy.” Absolutely right. And this is perhaps the greatest weakness of the Trump administration. When we won the election in 2016, it was with a very small group of people who accompanied him into the White House—and many of those have since left, myself included. As an outsider, an anti-establishment candidate, President Trump did not have a long roster of likely appointees outside his selections for the courts and cabinet positions. The question of building a cadre of MAGA loyalists around the president remains a very important one and will be crucial to his second term.

  Q: What was it like working with the president and what was your happiest and most memorable moment with Mr. Trump?

  GORKA: It was incredible. It still sends shivers down my spine when I think about going to work on Saturday, January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration. Here I was, a legal immigrant to the United States, a guy with a funny accent being driven in an unmarked van from the Transition Offices to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House compound. Being given my blue badge, and then walking over to the West Wing—which was empty (I guess people were still recovering from the celebratio
ns of the inaugural ball!)—and having the freedom, as a deputy assistant to the president for strategic issues, to wander around the corridors of the White House. It was a dream come true.

  Working with President Trump was inspirational because of his will to fight and never give up. This man—who is rich beyond rich, and famous beyond famous—sacrificed his personal comfort and security to represent us, to fight the swamp creatures and the Fake News Industrial Complex. That will be a lifelong inspiration for me.

  What was my proudest moment? It’s interesting. There was a photograph included in my last book Why We Fight that may surprise some but really does represent my proudest moment. It wasn’t taken when I escorted eighteen soon-to-be Green Berets to meet their new commander in chief, or the first time I met Mr. Trump, instead it was standing in the back of the Rose Garden on a beautiful late-Spring-early-Summer day as the president gave a formal press conference on his decision to remove us from the disastrous Paris Climate Accords. The climate accords weren’t one of my responsibilities, but I was there because of the significance of what this act meant. It was a rejection of the Left’s fake idol of environmentalism. It was about the principle that undergirded our campaign and every significant policy decision of the Trump administration, which is national sovereignty. And it was expressed perfectly when the president at that press conference said, “I was elected by the people, the citizens of Pittsburg, not the citizens of Paris.” Of course he was. But the very fact that he had to say that tells you how far we had sunk as a nation. The establishment elites had come to believe that the goal was to serve interests outside of this nation. They put more emphasis on the interests of globalizing institutions, special interest groups, and multinational businesses than they do on the American family, the American worker, the American national interest. That is why we chose Donald Trump, a man who understands that the job of the United States president is to represent Americans. That is why that photograph is there in my book Why We Fight, because it was a clear expression of what we believe in, of what “Make America Great Again” is founded upon. It is founded upon the idea that our government should act in the interests of the American people.

  Q: While working in the White House, did staff worry about the president’s practice of early morning tweets? Or about the president abruptly changing his mind?

  GORKA: Well, I didn’t. I’ve met many people, conservatives, who have criticized the president’s use of social media, and I’ve always said to them, “Look, this is one of the reasons he won. Without my friend Sean Hannity at FOX, without the president’s Twitter account, Hillary Clinton would be president.” That’s just a fact. There’s a reason that the president has more than sixty million followers on Twitter. The phenomenon of Fake News is absolutely real, and the president cuts through all of it; he just jumps over the endless lies of the mainstream media by using social media—whether it’s at 4 a.m. or otherwise. In the case of international affairs, his style pays dividends. Look at how his very blunt language regarding the dictator of the Hermit Kingdom in North Korea brought Kim Jong-un to the negotiating table in Singapore and to the historic moment when a United States president stepped across the Korean demilitarized zone for the first time since the Korean War. So, no, there’s nothing that I, or anyone else, can teach the president in terms of strategic communications.

  Regarding his abrupt decision making or about-turns, that’s his prerogative. When you’re president, you see documents that others don’t and get access to information that others don’t have. And, as such, he takes decisive steps when he sees a problem that needs to be fixed—whether it’s a strike against Syrian assets with cruise missiles after the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people or when his intelligence agencies inform him that a planned attack against Iran in retaliation for their downing one of our drones would result in the deaths of one hundred fifty civilians, and he cancels the planned action. He is the commander in chief, and we elected the president to make these decisions for us, using his best judgment with the information he’s been given.

  Q: Is President Trump the same in private as in public? What’s he really like?

  GORKA: I get asked this question perhaps more than any other. I can say that one of the reasons it was so easy for me to accept candidate Trump’s offer to advise him on national security issues was that behind closed doors, he was exactly the same man as I had seen in public life. There was no public persona and then a completely different one in private. There was no façade that was taken down behind closed doors. What you see is what you get. Trump is Trump, to put it succinctly. And this was confirmed for me again in the White House.

  Whether it was just the two of us behind closed doors in the Oval Office, or whether it was him in front of forty thousand people in a stadium, he is himself. The D.C. Swamp is littered with people who have a public persona that has nothing to do with who they really are in private. It is manufactured; it is artifice; it is completely fake. That is not the case with President Trump. Donald Trump is Donald Trump. If you want to know what he’s really like, well, open a newspaper, switch on a television: that is Donald Trump, and it is very refreshing, given what people are usually like in Washington.

  Q: Did I sign a non-disclosure agreement with the Trump administration or the campaign?

  GORKA: Absolutely. When I came onboard, when I met candidate Trump in June 2015 in Trump Tower, and he asked me to be his adviser on national security issues, I signed a non-disclosure agreement, which I have, of course, kept. Then, when I came into the administration and acquired my clearances, I signed all kinds of documents that protect the information that I was privy to in the administration. So, yes and yes, and unlike some people (like Omarosa), I actually took them seriously.

  Q: When President Trump attacks the press, isn’t that essentially an attack on the First Amendment?

  GORKA: No, not at all, because he’s just exercising his own First Amendment rights as a citizen and not taking government action. The First Amendment is very specifically about protecting American citizens’ freedom of speech and religion from the restrictive power of the federal government. President Trump has done nothing to curtail our First Amendment rights. On the contrary, he has defended religious liberty far more zealously than his immediate predecessor, who actually brought a legal case against the Little Sisters of the Poor demanding that they violate their religious beliefs in order to support Obamacare; and if you look at how open and accessible and spontaneous Trump has been with the press, he stands as one of the most press-friendly presidents in history. Often, on the way to Marine One, he’ll stop before getting in the helicopter and talk for more than half an hour to the press. If you compare that to President Obama, who actually fined, prosecuted, and surveilled journalists, and imprisoned journalists’ sources, you couldn’t have more of a contrast between two presidents.

  Many people don’t like what President Trump says or the way he says it, but that is an emotional response and not a curtailment of rights. As Ben Shapiro says, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” If you look at the facts and compare President Obama to President Trump, you will see that it was Obama who truly and systematically curtailed First Amendment rights of religion and speech. On religion, even National Review, no friend of President Trump, published an article lamenting, “As writers who caution against hyperbole, we cannot help but conclude that the Obama administration was immensely hostile to religious liberty when judged against history and previous administrations.”1 As for the press, more charges were brought under the Espionage Act against journalists and their sources by Obama than by any other president.2 President Trump is the opposite of that. His tweets might be controversial and elicit emotional responses, but the facts are that his respect of the First Amendment is paramount.

  Q: Is it different being interviewed at Fox News versus other networks?

  GORKA: Oh my, yes, indeed. Fox News is friendly. And Fox News wants to get to the truth. There are othe
r networks that have that same objective. But if you compare those to the CNNs of the world, the MSNBCs, those networks for the most part, have no interest in the truth. They really are organizations that prioritize narrative over the truth, their own political agenda over the facts.

  In my time at the White House, I felt this most acutely when I would go on, for example, Chris Cuomo’s show, or Anderson Cooper’s show, and it was just a tirade of either attacks against the president or absurd obsessions with things that really are of no consequence in the big scheme of things. One particular instance was when I was on Chris Cuomo’s morning show. These interviews are normally meant to last three minutes or maybe six minutes if it’s big breaking news. In this case, Chris Cuomo wanted to talk about one specific tweet of the president’s, not about policy. But about a tweet. And he wouldn’t stop. He kept on going back to the question of this tweet. To try and emphasize how absurd his obsession was, on camera, live from the north lawn of the White House, every couple of minutes I’d look at my watch and say, “Chris, we’ve now been discussing this tweet for eight minutes. Chris, we’ve now been discussing this tweet for eleven minutes.” At the end of the interview, he’d spent an obsessive sixteen minutes on one tweet. He didn’t want to debate policy. He didn’t want to talk about substance. He wanted to talk about a tweet. So, yes, you’ll never get Fox News airing a sixteen-minute segment about a tweet under the title “news.” I was very happy to be associated with Fox News before and after my time in the White House, and it is very different from other networks. Long may it stay that way!

  Q: Isn’t it revealing that so many voices on Fox News are immigrants, rather than homegrown patriots, who defend America’s values?