Sebastian Gorka
Sebastian Lukács Gorka is a media host and commentator, currently affiliated with Salem Radio Network and NewsMax TV, and a United States government official. He served in the first Trump administration as a deputy assistant to the president for seven months, from January until August 2017. In the second Trump administration, he has served as a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism since January 2025.
Gorka was born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, lived in Hungary from 1992 to 2008, and in 2012 became a naturalized American citizen. Gorka has written several books and for a variety of publications, is politically conservative and has ties to the alt-right, though he rejects the term and has condemned the alt-right, calling it "bogus" and "a new label for nationalists or irredentist bigots".
During his time in the first Trump administration, Gorka gave a series of combative interviews with the press in which he defended the administration's positions on national security and foreign policy. Various national security scholars in academic and policymaking circles have characterized Gorka as fringe. Some critics have challenged his academic credentials, his views on Islam and radicalization, and his motives for identifying with the Order of Vitéz and supporting Magyar Gárda, a paramilitary organization banned by the European Union.
Early life and education
Gorka was born in London to Zsuzsa and Pál Gorka on October 22, 1970. His parents had fled to the United Kingdom from Hungary after the failed anti-Soviet 1956 uprising and became naturalised British citizens on February 25, 1963. He attended St Benedict's School in west London, and received a lower second-class honours B.A. degree in philosophy and theology from Heythrop College, at that time a constituent college of the University of London.While at university, Gorka joined the British Territorial Army as a volunteer, serving over a period of three years in the 22 Intelligence Company of the Intelligence and Security Group, an interrogation unit with a NATO role specializing in Russian language training and supporting 1 Corps until the latter was disbanded in 1992 at the end of the Cold War.
In 1992, Gorka moved to Hungary, where he worked for the Hungarian Ministry of Defence while studying for a master's degree in international relations and diplomacy at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration, now known as the Corvinus University, which he completed in 1997. In 1997, he was a Partnership for Peace International research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome.
In 1998, Gorka served as an adviser to Viktor Orbán. In 2002, he entered the political science doctoral program at Corvinus University where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2007. Gorka is a naturalized American citizen.
Career
Gorka worked in the Hungarian Ministry of Defense during the prime ministership of József Antall.Following the September 11 attacks, Gorka became a public figure in Hungary as a television counterterrorism expert. This led to his being asked in 2002 to serve as an official expert on the parliamentary investigatory committee created to uncover the Communist background and alleged counterespionage of the new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy. Gorka failed to obtain the necessary security clearance from the National Security Office to serve on the committee, apparently because he was widely regarded as a spy working for British counterintelligence. Gorka defended himself against the charge by saying his service in the British army was merely as a uniformed member of its counterterrorism unit, tasked with assessing threats from groups such as the IRA.
In 2004, Gorka became an adjunct to the faculty of the new US initiative for the Program for Terrorism and Security Studies, a Defense Department-funded program based in the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. At the same time Gorka became an adjunct to USSOCOM's Joint Special Operations University, MacDill Air Force Base. He and his family relocated to the United States in 2008. He was hired as administrative dean at the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington D.C. Two years later, he began to lecture part-time for the ASD-funded Masters Program in Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism as part of the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program but remained in a largely administrative role. Between 2009 and 2011 Gorka wrote for the Hudson Institute of New York. Between 2011 and 2013, Gorka was an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. In 2014 Gorka assumed the privately endowed Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University Foundation. From 2014 to 2016, Gorka was an editor for national security affairs for Breitbart News, where he worked for Steve Bannon. In August 2016, he joined The Institute of World Politics, a private institution, on a full-time basis as Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare and Vice President for National Security Support. He is on the advisory board of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs.
First Trump administration (2017)
In January 2017, Gorka was appointed deputy assistant to the president and strategist in the Trump White House. He was a member of a White House team known as the Strategic Initiatives Group, which was set up by White House advisors Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. The Strategic Initiatives Group never got off the ground, and Gorka failed to obtain the security clearance necessary for work on national security issues. Questions were raised about Gorka's precise roles and duties within the Trump administration.In April 2017, The Washington Examiner reported that the Trump administration was planning to move Gorka to a role outside the White House; however, in May 2017 The Daily Beast reported that Trump and Bannon had intervened to retain Gorka in his position.
Credentials
Shortly after taking a position in the Trump administration in early 2017, Gorka drew criticism from multiple commentators in academia and politics, who characterized him as a fringe figure in academic and policy-making circles. Business Insider politics editor Pamela Engel has described Gorka as being "widely disdained within his own field."A number of academics and policymakers questioned Gorka's knowledge of foreign policy issues, his academic credentials, and his professional behavior. Andrew Reynolds, the now former professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, questioned the validity of Gorka's doctoral degree, noting discrepancies between how doctorates are normally awarded and how Gorka's was awarded. Reynolds said that the evaluation of each referee on Gorka's PhD committee was "a page of generalized comments – completely at odds with the detailed substantive and methodological evaluations that I've seen at every Ph.D defence I've been on over the last twenty years." According to Reynolds, at least two of the three referees had only Bachelor of Arts degrees, and one of the referees had published with Gorka previously, in violation of the academic expectation that reviewers have no personal or other form of interest in the success of a candidate's thesis. Georgetown University associate professor Daniel Nexon reviewed Gorka's Ph.D. thesis, describing it as "inept" and saying "It does not deploy evidence that would satisfy the most basic methodological requirements for a PhD in the US". Nexon ran Gorka's thesis text through plagiarism software, finding that portions of it were "repurposed", and concluded that he "might as well have mail-ordered his Ph.D.".
The journal Terrorism and Political Violence had never used Gorka as a reviewer because, according to the associate editor, he "is not considered a terrorism expert by the academic or policy community." In August 2017, Gorka falsely asserted that the Obama administration "invented" the term "lone-wolf terrorism", when the term actually had been widely used in the academic literature, media, and by governments long before that. Responding to his academic critics, Gorka said that there was an ongoing "proxy war" and that others were attacking him as a way to attack Trump.
In February 2017, Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, voiced his reservations about Gorka influencing policy in the White House, saying, "Gorka does not have much of a reputation in serious academic or policymaking circles. He has never published any scholarship of significance and his views on Islam and U.S. national security are extreme even by Washington standards. His only real 'qualification' was his prior association with Breitbart News, which would be a demerit in any other administration."
According to BuzzFeed, Gorka was unable to obtain a security clearance to work in the Hungarian Parliament.
Resignation
On August 25, 2017, Gorka's White House tenure ended, one week after Bannon's departure. Gorka stated that he had resigned because White House officials were "undermining" the Make America Great Again Platform. The White House disputed his claim that he resigned, but confirmed he was no longer employed there and did not have further access to the White House grounds. "Sebastian Gorka did not resign, but I can confirm he no longer works at the White House", a White House official told Politico on August 25, 2017.Post-administration (2017–2025)
He was a Fox News contributor from 2017 to 2019. On March 3, 2019, however, Mediaite reported that Fox News had confirmed that Gorka was no longer affiliated with the network.On January 1, 2019, he began hosting America First with Sebastian Gorka, replacing Michael Medved on Salem Radio from 3 to 6p.m. Eastern Time.
In September 2019, Gorka became a spokesman for Relief Factor, a fish oil supplement.
In July 2020, the White House announced that Trump would appoint Gorka as a member of the 14-member National Security Education Board. The board addressees "the national need for experts in critical languages and regions" by awarding scholarships and fellowships to students, and grants to colleges and universities.
In April 2021, Gorka was permanently banned from YouTube for repeatedly violating the company's policy on spreading misinformation related to the 2020 presidential election. Gorka's America First radio show had previously been banned from the site in 2019 for copyright violations, specifically due to Gorka's refusal to stop playing the Imagine Dragons song "Radioactive" in his intro segment.
In 2021, Gorka began hosting a weekend program called The Gorka Reality Check on NewsMax TV.