Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  If you’re looking for the self-described alpha in the room, look no further than Sebastian Gorka, he of the Eastern European shopping-mall PhD, mom jeans, and terrible taste in firearms. One can imagine Sebastian as a child, busy with his Lil’ War Crimes play set, or as a fedora-sporting college incel, solemnly intoning, “Why, no, I don’t have a girlfriend. While you were partying, I was preparing for the global race war to come.”

  A butt of Washington jokes even before becoming a member of the Axis of Assholes with Bannon, Miller, Flynn, et al., Gorka is a “terrorism expert” only insofar as he can insert the word “Muslim” or “jihadi” into every sentence, including questions about the weather. Gorka represents a particular side channel in American national security thinking, and it’s one of the reasons he was so attracted to Trump and Trumpism. You see, Gorka’s academic and practical counterterrorism credentials are, to put it mildly, nonstandard.

  His academic background was roundly mocked even before he took his place in the Trump orbit. Somehow it’s hard to imagine previous White House national security staffers whose credentials were “widely disdained” or whose PhD dissertation was considered slightly above something one might get from Trump University.18 His own dissertation advisor damned Gorka with only the faintest praise.

  Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School called Gorka “the Simon Cowell of Counterterrorism” and said, “Gorka does not have much of a reputation in serious academic or policy-making circles. He has never published any scholarship of significance and his views on Islam and US 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.”19 One commentator told CNN, “Gorka was more of a counter-terrorism enthusiast, than an expert.”20

  Ya think?

  Gorka represented so much that is just fundamentally wrong about Trump’s team in the White House; he combined a lack of knowledge, depth, and qualifications that were matched with a simply astounding degree of hubris, even in a White House not known for its modesty.

  Denied a security clearance—an issue that haunted the Trump White House from the beginning—Gorka’s duties were undefined, except to appear on television booming out praise for the Maximum Leader. When John Kelly’s purges of the Bannonites began, Gorka’s days were obviously numbered.

  Though Gorka claims he left the White House under his own steam, his security pass was canceled one day while he was away from the building. Gorka’s claim that he resigned was contradicted in a White House–wide email that said “Please notify officers of the following staff DNA (do not admit): Sebastian L. Gorka. . . . His pass has been deactivated.” In the event someone didn’t get the message, a follow-up from the White House rubbed salt in the wounds: “Mr. Gorka is more than likely still in possession of his PIV [Personal Identity Verification] and the WH Pass, as his DNA status was performed without him being on Complex.”21

  You know, just like everyone who leaves the White House on good terms.

  Like all serious national security officials, you can now catch Gorka fighting jihad and rocking his thick musk of pure testosterone on Fox News.

  The following transcript was provided by Wikileaks in the Fall of 2024.

  * * *

  – INTERCEPT 6 –

  TOP SECRET//SI//ORCON//NOFORN

  [BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]

  [CALL BEGINS IN PROGRESS]

  TRUMP: You’re the sweetest.

  HANNITY: You’re the sweetest.

  TRUMP: Love you.

  HANNITY: Love you more.

  TRUMP: Hang up.

  HANNITY: You hang up first.

  [TRANSCRIPT REPEATS 4 MINUTES]

  [TRANSCRIPT ENDS]

  15

  * * *

  THE ALT-REICH

  IF THERE’S ONE GROUP I’VE delighted in seeing the ETTD curse hit, it’s the alt-right. The rise of an overtly racist, overtly anti-Semitic tendency in modern American politics is revolting and disturbing and needs a pure, cleansing fire to drive it back into the shadows. Fear not, dear readers, this chapter will take the stick to Team Pepe, but first, we have to take a hard look at Donald Trump’s role in empowering, elevating, and protecting the alt-right.

  This president isn’t like any other Republican president in generations. That’s not a compliment, as you may have guessed, having read this far. His long, long history of racial and ethnic animus is a grotesque product of a time, an upbringing, and a family that wasn’t exactly uncomfortable with racial discrimination and segregation. For Trump’s father, it was a central part of their business model in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to Federal investigations and lawsuits over their “no vacancies for blacks” policy.1 The contrast to Trump’s views and actions on race and those of every other modern Republican is striking.

  Dwight Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas Guard to defend the first black students at Little Rock Central High School. Donald Trump retweeted numerous racists (“WhiteGenocideTM,” among many, many others) during his campaign and posts videos from the overtly racist Britain First fringe political party.

  Richard Nixon stood in Harlem in 1952 and said, “America cannot bear the burden of segregation” and passionately supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. He signed the Voting Rights Act in 1970 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. It took Donald Trump two days to denounce alt-right neo-Nazis, the Klan, and vocal anti-Semites who chanted “Jews will not replace us” and committed terrorist murder in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  In 1981 Reagan scorched Klansmen and racists, saying, “You are the ones who are out of step with our society. You are the ones who willfully violate the meaning of the dream that is America. And this country, because of what it stands for, will not stand for your conduct. My administration will vigorously investigate and prosecute those who, by violence or intimidation, would attempt to deny Americans their constitutional rights.”

  Donald Trump says the protesters and the Klan, the alt-right, and the Nazis they confronted in Charlottesville are morally equivalent. There are, he infamously said, “good people on both sides.”

  Ronald Reagan’s fiery denunciation of the Klan didn’t mince words or draw false moral equivalencies. He said it flat out: We don’t want your support. There’s the door. When Klan leaders tried to draft behind his 1984 campaign, he was blunt: “The politics of racial hatred and religious bigotry practiced by the Klan and others have no place in this country, and are destructive of the values for which America has always stood.’’

  Trump hired Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Julia Hahn, Sebastian Gorka, and a host of other alt-right-adjacent racial arsonists and wannabe ethnic cleansers and struggles to clearly, promptly, and with finality put racists and hate groups on blast without days of wheel-spinning, whataboutism, and equivocation.

  In 1984 President Reagan spoke at the Republican National Convention and issued a clarion call to tolerance: “In the party of Lincoln, there is no room for intolerance and not even a small corner for anti-Semitism or bigotry of any kind. Many people are welcome in our house, but not the bigots.”2 Donald Trump’s commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January 2017 left out any mention of either anti-Semitism or Jewish victims of the Nazis.3

  Donald Trump wants immigrants from Norway, but not from “the shithole countries.”4 I’m sure there’s some subtle demographic difference motivating him, but I just can’t put my finger on it.

  When George H. W. Bush learned David Duke was running for office in Louisiana, he didn’t just issue a fiery denunciation. He directed the RNC to deploy money and staff to fight against the Klansman. Donald Trump is, well, Donald Trump. His father, who was once arrested at a Klan rally in Queens, famously redlined New York apartments to prevent African Americans from renting them, and the strange fruit of Trump the Elder’s racism didn’t fall far from the tree.

  Trump claimed Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t objective
ly hear a case involving his scam university because of the judge’s Mexican heritage. He called for the death penalty for a group of black and Hispanic young men accused of raping a white woman in Central Park. Even though all the men were later completely exonerated, Trump has never retracted his statement. Trump’s aversion to having African Americans visible in his Atlantic City casinos led to a $200,000 fine against him.

  “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” said Kip Brown, a former Trump Castle employee.5 The obvious and the subtle racism of Trump inspires one of the sharpest cultural and political dividing lines of our era. If the central definition of racism is treating people of different races differently, Trump meets the standard for it, and then some. Oh, occasionally Kellyanne Conway or someone will beat it into him that racism isn’t good for the poll numbers, and he’ll allow some anodyne “My black friends” press release to slip past Stephen Miller and Michael Anton, but for the most part the White House may as well mount an air-raid-siren-sized racial dog whistle on the roof.

  Like an accusation they dare not speak aloud, GOP leaders in Washington and beyond excuse Trump’s racism and hide from it, but it’s there. They sighed with relief when his staff forced him to walk back his disastrous Charlottesville remarks, only to have Lucy pull the football away from them time and again whenever Stephen Miller gets his ear. His browbeating of NFL athletes who chose to kneel during the National Anthem in protest of police misconduct all just happened to be—wait for it—African American was another of his crapulous dog whistles, a display of winking racism disguised as populist patriotism.

  Hiring Ben Carson and a few “look at my black friend” callouts in rally halls doesn’t change the long thread of personal behavior and actions. It’s why the Nazis (neo- and otherwise), Klansmen, alt-righters, and the rest of the residents of our national shame closet hitched their wagons to him. Trump is the disease vector they felt they needed to infect the nation’s body politic more thoroughly. The racial hatred was there; they needed Daddy to set the fire.

  Let’s dispose of one objection right away, because it’s an immediate defensive pushback from the clickservative media: “You’re just adopting the left’s tactics of calling all Republicans racists.”

  No, not every Trump supporter is a racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child.

  However, every racist, xenophobic alt-right man-child is a Trump supporter. If there’s one legacy of his election and presidency we’ll spend decades cleaning up, it’s the casual ease with which he welcomed them into the daylight. Xenophobic fury at brown people coming here to live a better life doesn’t motivate every person who voted for Trump, but every single person motivated by a xenophobic fury at brown people coming here to live a better life was a Trump voter, and he shamelessly, consistently, and viciously plays that card on the campaign trail and in office.

  Trumpsplainers have demanded since the election that we listen to the Trump voters and that we understand their economic anxiety and their sense that Washington has betrayed them for decades. These may be true and explicable motivations for their choice of Trump, but those normalizing this president tend to elide and dismiss the centrality of racial animus and anti-immigrant hysteria in Trump’s campaign, his government, and his supporters.

  The easy explanation is that Trump is the kind of cranky old casual racist 70-something with whom we’re all familiar. Far from being an exclusive product of the Deep South, there are people across the country of a certain age who still harbor a kind of background radiation of animus toward black folks. The tragedy of Donald Trump is the pedestrian, tired nature of his racial anxieties, beliefs, and ideas. He isn’t a Nazi. He isn’t a Klansman. He isn’t an alt-righter. It’s just that he has no real problem with their beliefs as long as he feels as if they’re “on his side” and “nice to him.”

  I know it’s hard to admit, but our president may be the most egregious racist since Woodrow Wilson held the presidency, and that takes some doing. During his defense of the violence and murder in Charlottesville, I was reminded of Wilson’s low water mark in post–Civil War race relations. He re-segregated U.S. government offices, dismissed the principles of human equality in American diplomacy, and was basically a shitty human being on the topic of race.

  History repeats, first as tragedy, then as Trump. The resonance of this quote from Wilson with Trump’s infamous “both sides” narrative is striking: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”6 If you were a paunchy, polo-shirted torch carrier in Charlottesville, hearing the president of the United States defend the statue of a traitor and revel in Lost Cause rhetoric must have warmed the cockles of your heart and given you an erection you normally couldn’t achieve without the proximity of your anime waifu body pillow.

  The moral failure of leadership he displayed over Charlottesville alone should have disqualified Donald Trump from managing a Starbucks, to say nothing of leading a great, diverse nation, particularly one where we have struggled so long and so hard to bend that arc of history toward what we can be as a people, rather than where we started. Sadly, the excuse of “those people” now has a powerful avatar in the White House, and he never stops winking, nodding, and dog-whistling to his base.

  There’s a popular argument among Trump apologists that the Wall, deportations, and sending the Dreamers back to Mexico weren’t linchpins of Trump’s campaign rhetoric. This is at best cheap and sloppy historical revisionism.

  He opened his campaign with an attack on Mexicans. At Trump rallies, “Build the wall” was the tent pole of his speeches and central to the crowd’s Pavlovian call-and-response. His attacks on Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and the rest of the 2016 primary field were in large measure about their alleged weaknesses on immigration. Anti-immigrant rhetoric was the political conduit connecting more traditional working-class Republican and Reagan Democrat voters who buy into the modern stab-in-the-back myth that Mexicans took their jobs after the passage of NAFTA.

  Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was also a talisman among the alt-righters, who believe that allowing immigration (legal and otherwise) “browns” their desired lily-white America. Some fraction of Trump supporters may share his racial hostility in the privacy of the voting booth, but most of them needed at least a little distance between that hostility and overt racism.

  Not the alt-right.

  Donald Trump didn’t create the alt-right, but he coddled it, whispered sweet nothings in its unwashed ear, and helped it burst onto the national stage. Need a little full-blown racism to activate the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke, and the anime-loving boys of 4chan in service to the campaign? Trump’s your man.

  Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News published loving paeans to the alt-right, stoking its all-male, all-pale audience of cranky trailer park racists, incel weebs, and bronies. Their work in mainstreaming the alt-right and overt anti-immigrant and anti-globalist hostility as a vital and energetic part of the conservative movement is just as repulsive as you might think.

  In terms of Breitbart’s reputation, the Trump sugar rush came with the cost of Breitbart’s brand image; it’s permanently stained. It’s no longer a transgressive and provocative voice on the right. Under Bannon, it was Der Stürmer with a slightly more modern design sensibility.

  “In this way, Breitbart became an incubator of alt-right political energy,” writes Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain, his profile of Bannon.7 Bannon even once proclaimed, “We’re the platform for the alt-right.”8 Bannon might as well have taken a dump on Andrew Breitbart’s grave. Andrew, by Bannon’s own admission, may have been a provocateur and a right-leaning troublemaker, but he didn’t possess the same kind of ugly racist center found in Bannon’s alt-right Petri dish.

  While Donald Trump has set back race relations in the country by decades, the ETTD curse struck th
eir movement just as it does everyone else who gets under the white robe with him. The very exposure and influence they expected Trump to provide and the hope that they would have ideological fellow-travelers, if not outright allies, on the inside gave way quickly to the realization that for all America’s racial problems, for all our fraught history from the very beginning, the rest of America hates their racial intolerance as much as the alt-right hates people outside their fraternity of pissed-off suburban white-boy virgins.

  For many of the leaders of the alt-right, white supremacists and “identitarians,” crypto- and neo-Nazis, rebooted Klan dipshits, neo-Confederates, and the rest of their absurd kind, their alliance with and visibility due to Trump turned into a political death sentence.

  Some of them wanted to try for a replay of 1930s Munich, hoping to spark violent conflicts with liberal protesters and Antifa. They hoped the provocative, torchlit marches like Charlottesville’s and their aggressive Jew-baiting, promises of white homelands, and the “14 words”9 horseshit would lead to a white uprising. Richard Spencer, in particular, saw himself as the intellectual center of a movement on the verge of tangible political power.

  Famously and righteously punched right in his smug mouth on Inauguration Day 2016, Spencer had triggered the alt-right crisis and breakup weeks earlier, when at a Washington, DC, rally of his innocuously named National Policy Institute he burst into a “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory!” crypto-Nazi salute.10

  From there it was only a matter of time. By the summer of 2018 Spencer was lucky to gather a half-dozen local malcontents around a booth in a Waffle House to talk about his glorious new Reich. At every event, counterprotesters outnumbered his followers by an enormous ratio, and for all Spencer has a right to speak, his opponents have the same right, and use it.11

  After threatening to sue Kent State after they canceled one of his tiresomely overwrought speeches, Spencer quietly dropped his promised litigation.