Sebastian Gorka to be Trump’s counter-terrorism chief with controversial views on Islam

The staunchly pro-Israel defender of the Muslim ban is set to return to the White House without Senate confirmation

Sebastian Gorka has been selected as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism by Donald Trump. AFP

President-elect Donald Trump has picked Sebastian Gorka, a staunch defender of his so-called Muslim ban who has said there is not such thing as Palestine, to be his counter-terrorism chief at the National Security Council.

Mr Trump called Mr Gorka “a tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the Maga movement” in his Friday announcement of the nomination, noting his previous role as Strategist to the President.

Mr Gorka, a British-Hungarian-American with ties to Hungary's autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, served as an adviser in Mr Trump's first administration and is known for his harsh anti-Islam stance and defence of the president-elect's policy on Muslims.

He is also strongly pro-Israel, refusing to acknowledge Palestinian existence, and has suggested “the United Nations could be pushed into” the Hudson river in New York.

In 2017, the Trump administration announced an executive order under which people from Muslim-majority countries Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen were barred from entering the US. Mr Gorka said at the time: “It needs to be understood that good counter-terrorism isn't reactive. You don't wait until the terrorists from those seven nations have killed hundreds of people to do something about it … we are not going to wait until 82 people are mowed down by a lorry here in America as they were in France.”

He added that he believes the fight against terrorism is about “a war within Islam … a war for the heart of Islam” and “not a war with Islam.”

That emphasis could indicate a counterterror strategy that is again more focused on threats from abroad than on domestic terrorism in the US, which represents the largest statistical threat of political violence, according to government reports.

A report released last month by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank, found the number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets “motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined”.

John Bolton, the hawkish former US official who has defended the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, this week called Mr Gorka “a con-man”.

“I think he is a perfect example of somebody who owes his position purely to Donald Trump,” Mr Bolton said. “He doesn’t display loyalty. He displays fealty. And that’s what Trump wants. He doesn’t want Gorka’s opinions, he wants Gorka to say ‘yes, sir’, and I’m fully confident that’s exactly what will happen no matter what it is Trump says.”

Democratic National Committee spokesman Alex Floyd called Mr Gorka “a far-right extremist who is as dangerous as he is unqualified to lead America’s counter-terrorism strategy”.

Mr Gorka's position in the White House will not need confirmation from the US Senate like many key cabinet posts and he appeared to accept the job offer in a post on X, where he said he was “honoured” to serve “in what will be the greatest administration of the modern age”.