Dr. Sebastian Gorka, chief strategist for the MAGA Coalition and former deputy assistant to President Trump, looked back on Election Day 2016 with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily.
“I had joined the transition team with my wife back in October,” he recalled. “I was working on the NSC transition team with Gen. Flynn. My wife was working on the DHS – Department of Homeland Security – transition team.”
“In the run-up to the actual election, I’ll tell you, I was in a very peculiar place psychologically because time and again people would ask me, ‘So what happens if she wins?’ And I would honestly tell them, ‘Look, I’m not even allowing myself to go there mentally because as a Republic we’ve already got three wheels off the cliff, and if Hillary Clinton wins, that’s it: from the Supreme Court on down, we’ve locked in Democrat administrations in perpetuity.’ So I was committed to a Trump victory,” he said.
“I remember distinctly the night of the election getting very concerned,” Gorka said. “I think it was Bret Baier who made a statement, saying, ‘We’re having issues with some of the results coming in. The margins are too tight. We have to go to sleep and wake up in the morning to get the right results.’ And I thought, ‘No, don’t go there!’ The idea that we’re not going to track the results, all kinds of strange shenanigans could occur. I got very seriously worried about it at that point.”
“And then, it all turned, and then, county after county, blue-collar Democrat areas, voted repeatedly for candidate Trump. It was a glorious night. I didn’t sleep. I sat on my porch in Virginia with my son, smoking cigars and waiting for a new dawn in America,” he concluded.
Kassam invited Gorka to imagine what the major global events of the Trump presidency would have been like with Hillary Clinton in the White House.
“Well, it would have been a combination of two things,” Gorka replied. “It would have been the dilettantism that we saw Hillary actually demonstrate with regard to our Libya policy, that turned that country into a Dantean hell and flooded weapons all into the west and south of the Saheel region. It would have been rank amateurish behavior that would have escalated violence.”
“Or let’s be blunt: if you’ve listened to the revelations from Donna Brazile’s book, if you follow the massive scandal that is Fusion GPS and Uranium One, then we would have had a president who was just open to the highest bidder,” he continued.
“That’s the Clinton way. It is a crime cartel, from cattle futures to Whitewater to Uranium One. So we would have had a president who didn’t know what she was doing, or was open to the highest bidder,” he said.
Speaking as a Virginia resident, Gorka said the state “used to be a Republican commonwealth,” but thanks to “the massive, massive influx of liberal government workers that vote Democrat,” Tuesday night’s gubernatorial election was “pretty much a foregone conclusion.”
“You didn’t have the dynamic occur which happened last year, which is the rank outsider energize former Democrat working-class voters to vote for him,” Gorka said, “because that’s really the key to last year. When you have laid-off steelworkers in the Steel Valley of Youngstown, Ohio, vote for a billionaire from Queens, that’s remarkable. That’s a political revolution.”
“We didn’t have that effect in Virginia. We had a milquetoast kind of quasi-RINO running against an establishment Democrat,” he observed. “So the conclusion was foregone. There was no Trump candidate in Virginia, and the same goes for New Jersey.”
Kassam asked if state Republican parties would be able to learn the lessons of the Virginia election as expressed by the analysts who had appeared on Breitbart News Daily throughout Wednesday morning.
“This is what we’re going to find out because we know that Steve has done a very good job,” Gorka answered, referring to Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon. “I’ve been helping him. He’s done a superb job rattling the cage of the GOP RINO establishment in D.C. But clearly, that’s not enough. This has now got to be taken to the state level and to the state parties and to the state legislatures. We have to see that ‘draining of the Swamp’ attitude taken down to the next level of politics in America.”
“2018 will be a fascinating year. I think those who model themselves on Trump, and who come in like a Judge Moore, like a Kelli Ward, they will do well,” he predicted.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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