False gods of war
In Trump’s Situation Room, as on the fields of Ilium, those who wage war seem unable to experience the violence they inflict as real violence.
Sebastian Gorka (Source image: Gage Skidmore / Creative Commons)
Sebastian Gorka, the senior director for counterterrorism for the White House National Security Council, is regaling a sparse audience at February’s Conservative Political Action Conference with a story of what it’s really like to work for President Trump. His signature goatee and booming Mitteleuropean accent punctuate his performance as the pompous blowhard; his we’re-all-in-on-the-joke tone makes him one of the few Trump surrogates to truly follow the master.
“Smile every day,” he shouts like he’s bringing an arena to its feet, channeling the mood of Trumpism’s triumph. “Revel, revel, revel in what you have done!”
He launches into a story about a top-secret meeting—“everything has been declassified,” he reassures the rapt audience, drawing them into Trump’s inner circle—in which the President was informed of what Gorka calls an “ISIS terrorist enclave” in Somalia.
