Retrospective on Trump’s Counterterrorism Adviser

A bit of context for Donald Trump’s endorsement of Viktor Orbán

Nearly five years ago, during the first year of the Trump administration, John Nichols published Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America. As he described it: “This book is not about Donald Trump, per se. This book is about Trumpism — the combination of propaganda and power, paranoia and plutocracy — that now grips America.”

As a “field guide” (indicated in the subtitle), it introduces readers to some important figures in the administration’s first months. Those who headline the chapters:

Robert Mercer, Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, Kris Kobach, James Mattis, Patrick Shanahan, Mick Mulvaney, H. R. McMaster, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, David Friedman, Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Omarosa Manigault, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, John Kelly, Alexander Acosta, Andrew Giuliani, Neil Gorsuch, Mike Pence, Elaine Chao, Tom Price, Seema Verma, Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Newt Gingrich, Robert Walker, Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Sonny Perdue, Ajit Pai, Steven Mnuchin, Jay Clayton, Gary Cohn.

We recognize their names well by now. Some departed the administration early, some lasted to the bitter end, and some remain in Trump’s good graces even today, for what that is worth. How important they remain today, five years later, in 2022, could be debated.

But one stood out to me: Sebastian Gorka.

That is because, on January 3, 2022, Donald Trump rang in the New Year by declaring his “complete support” for Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

Remembering that Trump once employed Gorka helps interpret what it means that Trump is today endorsing Orbán.

The Vitézi Rend in Hungary

Gorka, the top counterterrorism adviser to Trump, belonged to a Hungarian Nazi group, Vitézi Rend. This was revealed by a Budapest correspondent for the Jewish newspaper the Forward.

Soon after the revelation, Sebastian Gorka left the Trump administration, as noted in Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse. It was never made publicly clear whether he quit or was fired. He “contributed mightily to the development of Trump’s most…