Trump’s Blob

In mid-March Sebastian Gorka, the White House’s senior director for counterterrorism, took the stage at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. The think tank has served as the inner sanctum of the foreign policy establishment for more than a century: the place where a bipartisan collection of diplomats and strategists planned much of the postwar international order, and where Henry Kissinger published his first bestseller. Throughout its history the Council has prided itself on the collegial tone of its gatherings; its meeting guidelines state that “all participants are expected to maintain the highest levels of civility and respect.” And yet here was Gorka, a MAGA diehard known for threatening journalists and disparaging Islam, discussing the administration’s counterterrorism strategy with the PBS correspondent Nick Schifrin.

Gorka started by attacking Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, who had just resigned from the Trump administration over the 2026 Iran war, calling him “an utter disgrace.” He lavished praise upon Trump (“What the president has done is absolutely astounding”) and insulted the press, from “the scum at Politico” to the “HuffPo jokers” to a New York Times journalist whom he described as “some piece of human filth.” He grew more combative as the conversation progressed, taking an errant swipe at the “transgender lunacy flag,” dressing down a Harvard Law School lecturer who tried to question him about Congress’s constitutionally granted war powers—“Who’s the commander in chief?” Gorka repeatedly asked—and lashing out when asked whether the administration planned for blowback from Iran: “I mean, you have to be smoking Hunter Biden’s crack pipe to believe this crap.” In each case, the moderator moved on to the next question.

Though Gorka exuded confidence on the CFR dais, he was in fact largely unwelcome in most policy circles until recently. During the first Trump term, he lasted less than a year in the White House, and was unable to obtain a security clearance; Foreign Policy denounced him as a “far-right nativist” and a “terrible scholar,” and even John Bolton called him a “con man.” Between Trump’s terms, he hosted a radio show called America First, entirely shut out of the mainstream save for appearances on Fox News.

But since Trump returned to office, the bipartisan foreign policy establishment has seemed eager to bring figures like Gorka into the fold. CFR recently hired Trump’s former Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg and economic adviser Pierre Yared as fellows, and has given a stage to more than a dozen second-term officials, including Jamieson Greer, Peter Navarro, Chris Wright, Doug Burgum, and Elbridge Colby. (Kristi Noem, then Homeland Security secretary, was due to speak in October 2025 but canceled two days before.) The Atlantic Council has brought on at least eight Trump administration alumni, including the former homeland security adviser Julia Nesheiwat (recently nominated for an ambassadorship-at-large to the Arctic), who sits on its board as well as being a distinguished fellow. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), founded in 2007 to give the Democratic Party stronger defense bona fides in the George W. Bush era, now hosts events with Trump officials, like the hostage envoy Adam Boehler, who headlined the opener of its National Security Exchange series in September 2025; CNAS retains Ellen Lord, formerly the Trump Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, on its board of advisers. Not every institution has this access: at a January 2026 trade event, the Brookings Institution’s economic studies director said that “multiple” administration officials had been invited and none accepted.

Read more in The New York Review of Books

Jonathan Guyer

Program Director