Sebastian Lukács Gorka (Hungarian: Gorka Sebestyén Lukács; (born in 1970) is a British-Hungarian-American media host and commentator, currently affiliated with Salem Radio Network and NewsMax TV, and a former United States government official. He served in the first Trump administration as a Deputy Assistant to the President for seven months, from January until August 2017.
Gorka was born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, lived in Hungary from 1992 to 2008, and in 2012 became a naturalized American citizen. Gorka has written several books and for a variety of publications and is politically conservative.
In November 2024, Gorka was named to become deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism in the second Trump administration.
Gorka was born in London to Zsuzsa and Pál Gorka. His parents had fled to the United Kingdom from Hungary after the failed anti-Soviet 1956 uprising and became naturalised British citizens on February 25, 1963. He attended St Benedict's School in west London, and received a lower second-class honours (2:2) B.A. degree in philosophy and theology from Heythrop College, a constituent college of the University of London.
While at university, Gorka joined the British Territorial Army as a volunteer (typically committing to a weekend a month and a fortnight's annual camp), serving over a period of three years in the 22 Intelligence Company of the Intelligence and Security Group (Volunteers), an interrogation unit with a NATO role specializing in Russian language training and supporting 1 (BR) Corps until the latter was disbanded in 1992 at the end of the Cold War.
In 1992, Gorka moved to Hungary, where he worked for the Hungarian Ministry of Defense while studying for a master's degree in international relations and diplomacy at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration, now known as the Corvinus University, which he completed in 1997. In 1997, he was a Partnership for Peace International research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome.
In 1998, Gorka served as an adviser to Viktor Orbán. In 2002, he entered the political science doctoral program at Corvinus University where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2007. Gorka is a naturalized American citizen.
Gorka worked in the Hungarian Ministry of Defense during the prime ministership of József Antall. Following the September 11 attacks, Gorka became a public figure in Hungary as a television counterterrorism expert. This led to his being asked in 2002 to serve as an official expert on the parliamentary investigatory committee created to uncover the Communist background and alleged counterespionage of the new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy.
In 2004, Gorka became an adjunct to the faculty of the new US initiative for the Program for Terrorism and Security Studies (PTSS), a Defense Department-funded program based in the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. At the same time Gorka became an adjunct to USSOCOM's Joint Special Operations University, MacDill Air Force Base. He and his family relocated to the United States in 2008.
He was hired as administrative dean at the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington D.C. Two years later, he began to lecture part-time for the ASD(SO/LIC)-funded Masters Program in Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism as part of the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program but remained in a largely administrative role. Between 2009 and 2011 Gorka wrote for the Hudson Institute of New York (now Gatestone Institute).
Between 2011 and 2013, Gorka was an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.[14] In 2014 Gorka assumed the privately endowed Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University Foundation.
From 2014 to 2016, Gorka was an editor for national security affairs for Breitbart News, where he worked for Steve Bannon. In August 2016, he joined The Institute of World Politics, a private institution, on a full-time basis as Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare and Vice President for National Security Support. He is on the advisory board of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA).
In January 2017, Gorka was appointed Deputy Assistant to the President and Strategist in the Trump White House. He was a member of a White House team known as the Strategic Initiatives Group, which was set up by White House advisors Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.
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