Donald Trump’s former aide Sebastian Gorka is continuing to bash the media on behalf of his former boss, despite leaving the White House last week.
Gorka is an American citizen who was born in Britain to Hungarian parents, so has been repeatedly invited on UK television when broadcasters need to wrap a union flag around a Trump story.
Invariably, Gorka has been happy to oblige, even though he appears to loathe the mainstream media/MSM. Earlier this year, he accused the BBC of an “agenda driven question list”.
But still he comes. On Wednesday night, Gorka appeared on Channel 4 News to ostensibly explain why he stepped away from Trump’s top table - a contentious point since his account is contradicted by officials at the time who said “he did not resign but he no longer works” for the administration.
Things inevitably got tetchy when the conversation with presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy brought up Trump dithering over criticism of white supremacists after a day of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Gorka, unsurprisingly, sided with the US President, who initially blamed bigotry “on all sides” rather than condemn those sporting symbols of Nazism.
After Gorka suggested it was “the left that has normalised violence” and pointed to a separate incident where a man shot a Republican member of congress in June, Guru-Murthy took issue:
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Did you look at pictures of Nazis and say, you have to condemn these people? You can’t say they are the same, there are not great people in amongst these marchers. These are Nazis.
Sebastian Gorka: Just keep spinning your left-wing wet dreams, please.
KGM: Is that the best you’ve got?
SG: No, you are clearly not listening. There is violence on both sides of these events. When people come with baseball bats and you’re in... Urine bombs, we don’t do that in a democracy. The KKK are just as bad as people on the left to come to be violent. It’s not a complicated
KGM: This is very revealing, if this is what you were saying to Donald Trump? I think we get a good sense of why he said what he said.
SG: I was not advising him, I was on vacation when Charlottesville happened. If you don’t understand that assassinating or attempting to assassinate Republican congressmen is actually wrong, then Channel 4 should not be in the news business.
KGM: Well, we will take your advice under consideration.
Channel 4 News viewers were absorbed.
In an interview marked by its sustained, sometimes pantomime tension, he hailed Trump’s victory as “a hostile takeover”.
“Don’t worry, we will win,” he said, referring to the Make America Great Again agenda despite the departure of himself and Trump’s ex-chief strategist Steve Bannon. The idea he was ousted by a military-dominated White House was “a cheap narrative from a Tom Clancy novel”, he boomed.
He made clear he believes everyone is just as fascinated with the Gorka story as himself, saying people would know who he was criticising in his resignation letter “if you have a pulse, you are breathing, you follow US politics”.
When Guru-Murthy suggested Trump did little to save him, Gorka sniffed that his understanding of politics is “facile” and signalled: “You are not listening.”
On the issue of being sacked, Gorka insisted: “I wasn’t sacked, you need to get your facts right.”
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: They said that you were.
Sebastian Gorka: “A low-level flunky who lied about her rank sent out an anonymous e-mail to reporters. That is all you need to know about her spin on the matter.