All the President’s Men
Adam Lehrer
The man responsible for staffing Trump’s administration is a right-wing DJ with a murky past who has allowed saboteurs to contravene the president’s agenda from within—setting the precedent that there is no cost for defying the commander-in-chief.
Donald Trump listens during an Ambassador Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on March 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. At right is Sergio Gor, director of White House personnel. / Win McNamee/Getty Images
It seems fair to sum up the first 100 days of the second Donald Trump administration as a succession of often petty-seeming, self-undermining squabbles and psychodramas that have served to obscure whatever clear policy directions the president himself has set out. Former Pentagon officials have partnered with the media and Democratic Party officials to undermine Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Head of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk took to the website he owns to call senior economic adviser Peter Navarro a “moron,” “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Then Musk feuded with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over DOGE’s accomplishments and the hedge-fund manager’s private-sector track record.
It can’t be easy managing the contradictions resulting from the coalition politics that joined former Democrats like Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard to traditional Republicans, libertarians and MAGA under one banner. As one media report put it: “A bigger tent means more room for fighting underneath it.”
Yet the problem appears to go deeper than a host of big egos jockeying for position in front of the television cameras. There is a striking disconnect between the president’s personnel and his policies. To some extent, that’s because, according to sources close to the administration, the Office of Presidential Personnel (PPO) has filled only one-fifth of the jobs allocated to political appointees. And that leaves career bureaucrats running the government. Since most of them are Democrats, the result, says one first term Trump official, is obvious. “If this goes on for too long, at a minimum they will undermine Trump’s message,” they said. “At worst, they’ll contravene his policies.”
It’s possible that the Trump administration doesn’t have a vetting problem, but an insubordination one. Either way, it’s one that Gor has allowed to fester.
While this explanation is certainly true, it omits the fact that some of the most visible fractures within the administration are not between the president and career bureaucrats, but among the political appointees themselves. Anti-Trump schemers don’t appear to be sneaking through the cracks the way Eric Ciaramella, the CIA officer and onetime Biden deputy who helped engineer the 2019 impeachment of Trump snuck into the National Security Council during the president’s first term. Instead, openly anti-Trump policymakers are being ushered into the administration by Trump’s own cabinet officials, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has hired officials allied with billionaire libertarian donor Charles Koch, who opposed Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. As recently as January, Trump made a point of warning his people not to hire Koch lackeys. Yet that didn’t stop Gabbard and others from hiring them in key roles across government, including at the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
A large part of the responsibility to staff the Trump administration with people who believe in the president’s policies falls on the Director of the PPO, Sergio Gor. Now responsible for filling over 4,000 Executive Branch jobs, the 38-year old Gor grew up on the island of Malta, and speaks fluent Maltese. He entered Trump World through his business ties with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr. In 2021, the two founded Winning Team Publishing, which has published several books attributed to the president—including Our Journey Together, Save America, and Letters to Trump, which has earned more than $6 million in sales. The firm has also published books by others in the Trump circle, including Navarro and Charlie Kirk.
Kirk told the press that Gor “gets along with everyone in Trump’s orbit.” Nicknamed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago,” the president’s private club and personal residence, Gor has DJ’ed MAGA theme parties there. During the campaign he was a frequent fixture on the club’s porch, where he solicited campaign donations from the club’s members.
“Gor is [just] in over his head,” one tech executive close to MAGA and the administration told Tablet. “I don’t think he’s trying to place the wrong people in the administration out of malevolence. It’s that the administration is a $7 trillion institution, and he has no experience staffing any institution.”
Gor’s biography shows similar signs of having been thrown together in a hurry. While he advertises himself as a devout Maltese Catholic, some of his acquaintances reportedly have claimed that he was born in the Soviet Union—not exactly a native hotbed of Roman Catholicism—before emigrating to Malta as a boy. The family then moved in 1999 to Los Angeles, where Gor attended high school. He reportedly shortened his name to Gor from Gorokhovsky, which he went by while he was enrolled at George Washington University. In 2008, he reportedly was an activist in “Catholics for McCain,” which marked his first foray into Republican party politics.
Gor then worked for the Republican National Committee and fringe GOP lawmakers Randy Forbes, Michele Bachmann and Steve King. After a stint at Fox News, Gor got a job as communications director with Senator Rand Paul and eventually found his way into Trump’s orbit.
Whether or not Gor’s experience on Capitol Hill and on the Mar-a-Lago back porch qualify him to staff the White House is certainly debatable. What is clear is that Gor is loyal to Trump, as suggested by his role at Winning Team Publishing and the fact that he did not abandon the president in his post-January 6 exile. More significant than Gor’s loyalty to Trump may be his partnership and close personal relationship with Donald Trump, Jr., who applauded his father’s decision in hiring Gor on social media last November.
In describing Gor’s role, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told The Washington Post last December that, unlike in 2017, now “‘there are basically 20 people competing for every job’—and it will be up to Gor to determine who’s worthy and loyal.”
Yet in contrast to his work on the campaign and transition, during which Gor allies told the media that he was “ruthlessly efficient,” he seems neither ruthless nor efficient at the PPO. Another source inside Trump circles told Tablet that Gor needs to recognize his own problem. “The buck stops with Sergio,” said the source. “If he needs help, then he should ask.”
Instead, he seems to be staffing the White House as if he were monitoring the velvet rope at a nightclub—one where he believes his job, sources tell Tablet, is to keep out “neocons.” Perhaps this is Gor’s penance for having worked for John McCain, the last actual neocon with any power. These days, the term “neocon” has become a synonym in D.C. circles for “Jew” or “pro-Israel,” terms that are often used interchangeably by Koch loyalists who are eager to direct attention away from their own decade-long opposition to Trump and his policies on trade, the Middle East and securing America’s borders, while re-shaping Trump’s MAGA movement in their own image.
No one believes that Gor harbors any ill will towards the president, and everyone interviewed argues that he’s a true Trump loyalist. But all underscored that agreeability can be easily interpreted as weakness when hungry wolves are at the door. And the Koch network’s wolves aren’t just at the door. They’ve made it past the velvet ropes to the dinner table.
If there is no cost for defying the president, others will see it as a green light to advance their own causes under Trump’s banner, undermining the President’s agenda and leaving Trump to take the blame.
Concerns over Caldwell’s fealty to the president’s agenda surfaced at the start of Trump’s term. In January, Trump warned on Truth Social against hiring Koch-affiliated figures for administration roles, but days later two foreign policy analysts from the Koch network were named to DOD policy jobs. Caldwell, himself an alumnus of the Koch-funded think tank Defense Priorities, was believed to be responsible for inserting the other two into the Pentagon even as his friend Hegseth was tied down in the middle of a tough confirmation process.
“Every day we hear about someone extremely disloyal who’s been vocally critical of the president securing a job,” reporter and MAGA influencer Laura Loomer told Tablet. Her Twitter feed keeps a running account of what she calls a “vetting problem” that has let various anti-Trump activists into positions across the bureaucracy—DOJ, NSC, even TSA.
It doesn’t have to be like this, says Loomer. “There are so many hyper qualified people that want to work in this administration looking to get hired,” she said. “High level people looking for senior positions, Trump loyalists. But they’re being turned away.” It wasn’t until last month that the administration moved out General Timothy Haugh, the Biden-appointed director of the National Security Agency, the institution that facilitated spying on Trump during his 2016 campaign and the first year of his presidency.
Sources told Tablet there’s no good reason why the administration shouldn’t be much further along in the staffing process. “The PPO is backed up with background checks,” said one first term Trump official. “But some of these people have been slated in for spots since November and they’re still not in. Why weren’t these background checks done before? Then there are people who served in the last administration and they already have security clearances, so there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be in. If there was a problem with them during the first term, that’s easy to check.”
Even the career bureaucrats are uneasy about the current situation. “The functionaries are saying that they want political direction,” says the former Trump official. “Even they don’t want a replay of the chaos from the first term, but they need political appointees directing staff to implement the president’s policies. If this keeps up, it will fuel the idea that the president is incompetent.”
But the Kochs bought a truce with the left when in 2019 they partnered with progressive mega-donor George Soros to start the Quincy Institute, a think-tank perhaps best known for a pro-Iran stance advanced most boldly by prominent Iran lobbyist Trita Parsi, Quincy’s executive vice president. The stance wasn’t simply ideological: A detailed 2011 press report showed that Koch Industries used foreign subsidiaries to evade U.S. trade sanctions barring American companies from selling materials to the Islamic Republic. According to Bloomberg News, Koch “products helped build a methanol plant for Zagros Petrochemical Co., a unit of Iran’s state-owned National Iranian Petrochemical Co.”
Indeed, the Koch business empire has long been built on the principle that there is money to be made by doing business with anti-American totalitarian regimes. According to Mayer’s 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, the Kochs’ fortune started when their father Fred received $500,000 from Stalin for helping to build 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Then Fred Koch’s company Winkler-Koch completed a Nazi oil refinery that helped keep the Luftwaffe in the air, until the facility was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.
These days, Koch-funded policy analysts are aligned with John Mearsheimer and others from the “realist” school of foreign policy—people who hold that Israel is the destabilizing force in the Middle East, and thus a nuclear bomb in the hands of Iran’s terror regime will stabilize the region. Trump, on the other hand, has been clear that Iran, preferably through negotiations, cannot be allowed to have the bomb.
And Iran is far from the only reason that the Kochs have spent millions opposing Trump for nearly a decade. They’re also pro-China, having invested billions in the People’s Republic over the last several years. In 2018, as the Kochs’ U.S. companies announced hundreds of layoffs, Koch subsidiary INVISTA unveiled plans to build a $1 billion manufacturing plant in China—a huge investment facilitated by Trump’s tax cuts, which saved the Kochs as much $1.4 billion. They used the rest of their windfall on advertising buys opposing Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports.
Despite their successes in infiltrating the Trump administration, the Kochs seem as determined as ever to thwart the president’s policies vis-à-vis Beijing’s predatory trade practices. At present, two separate groups reportedly funded by Koch—the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the New Civil Liberties Alliance—have sued Trump over his China tariffs. Other Koch-aligned groups have joined the anti-China tariff offensive, like the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
Trump’s tariff regime, AIER argued in April, are a “regressive and harmful” policy that “do not protect American industries.” Another AIER article hit on the same theme, contending that “tariffs do not protect American industries—they weaken them. They inflate prices, stifle competition, and erode international trade relationships.” In another piece titled “Even Tariff Supporters Say Trump’s Trade War Is a Disaster for Americans,” AIER argued that Trump supporters are “unable to grasp” that the “costs of tariffs are ultimately borne by American consumers.”
Maybe AIER has it right on tariffs. (Even if they’re not, it’s a free country). But Trump won the popular vote by promising to tariff China and other nations using trade imbalances to impoverish American workers, so it’s downright bizarre that the former head of AIER William Ruger was tapped for a top spot at ODNI—even though he, too, has left a public record of attacking Trump on tariffs.
“Tariffs are taxes on consumers, workers, and businesses,” Ruger tweeted in June 2018. “Given what we know about the economics of trade, America First ought to include a robust free trade approach not protectionism,” he wrote in another post that month. “How is the US going to isolate its largest trading power without harming Americans? What will you tell US farmers about why they can’t sell agricultural products to China? Ditto for other exporters? Or by ‘isolate’ did you mean ‘not isolate but try to seem tough on China’?” he asked in a now-deleted post from December 2019.
In 2018, as then-vice president of research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute, Ruger wrote in The New York Times: “America’s approach to the world just isn’t working to make us safer and more prosperous. And President Trump isn’t helping. We need a more effective and realistic foreign policy.”
Ruger is now the Trump administration’s deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration, responsible for the presidential daily briefing. He replaced another Koch-sponsored foreign policy analyst, Daniel Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, who was removed from his post, apparently by the president himself, after Trump allies raised alarms.
Sources throughout MAGA reached by Tablet expressed dismay at Ruger’s appointment. “How is this guy a filter for identifying issues and framing questions for the president,” said one former intelligence official who’s served in numerous administrations. “It’s insane they brought in Ruger. There seems to be a total disregard for the president’s stated intent to keep out Koch people—people with a shallow understanding of the issues who aren’t objective or right.”
Tablet reached out to ODNI for comment on the back-to-back appointments Koch-network figures, but did not receive a response.
Given the glacial pace at which White House jobs are being filled, it’s easy to see how a relative neophyte like Gor would come to rely on a longstanding network like the one funded by the Koch brothers to fill jobs in a hurry with people who have at least worked in D.C. think tanks and are familiar enough with normative policy discourse in their areas of expertise. The problem with the Koch network, though, is that it’s not a source of experts; it’s something more like what they accuse “neocons” of being, namely a cult of true believers whose preferred policy agenda—which stresses libertarian free trade and open borders ideas, while seeking to avoid conflict with China and Iran—would appear to have little to do with the American interest as defined by Donald Trump. Once in office, Koch loyalists seem to stay loyal to their prior agenda.
It’s possible therefore that the Trump administration doesn’t have a vetting problem, but an insubordination one. Either way, it’s one that Gor has allowed to fester.
Aside from the Pentagon, the Koch network’s problem with loyalty to Trump’s agenda is particularly visible in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who jumped parties two years after her unsuccessful 2020 run for president, once sat on the board of a Koch-funded think tank at the Catholic University of America. But more significant is her past record of opposition to Trump’s foreign policy, especially on Iran. For instance, in July 2019 she criticized Trump for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Obama’s agreement with the mullahs, she said, “prevented war. And that’s the danger of what the Trump administration is doing right now, pushing us closer and closer to war with Iran by ripping up that deal.”
In fact, the substance of her 2020 run for the Democratic Party’s nomination was all about attacking Trump on Iran—and defending Obama’s key foreign policy initiative—as she showed in an extensive series of tweets in the spring and summer of 2019:
“Your Iran strategy has been ill-advised and short-sighted. Change course now. Return to the Iran nuclear agreement before it’s too late. Put aside your pride and political calculations for the good of our country. Do the right thing.” June 20, 2019
“Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia want to drag the United States into war with Iran, and Trump is submitting to their wishes. The cost in money and lives will be catastrophic.” April 09, 2019
“Trump’s shortsighted foreign policy is bringing us to the brink of war with Iran and allowing Iran to accelerate nuclear program—just to please Saudis and Netanyahu. This is not America first.” June 13, 2019
“Iran war is HIGHLY likely unless Trump swallows his pride & returns to the Iran nuclear agreement he tore up. But I fear he won’t put the interests of our country & those who’ll be killed in such a war ahead of his own pride & personal political interests.” June 14, 2019
After Trump had IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani liquidated in January 2020, Gabbard said, “This was very clearly an act of war by this president without any kind of authorization or declaration of war from Congress, clearly violating the Constitution.”
During her confirmation process, GOP lawmakers expressed confidence that Gabbard was now fully behind the president’s policies. But Capitol Hill sources tell Tablet that Gabbard’s picks are again raising serious concerns.
“It’s shocking,” one Hill source told Tablet. “The president couldn’t have been any clearer in his message regarding Koch hires. The Kochs have opposed him every step of the way. This should be a non-starter.”
Another source inside the Trump camp tells Tablet that Gabbard and others “are openly defying the president.”
Tablet emailed the White House spokesperson for comment on how public opponents of the president’s policies from the Koch network continue to be appointed to sensitive positions. They did not respond.
Trump famously demands loyalty and at the same time has a long record of forgiving those who’ve crossed him. For instance, he forgave JD Vance for calling him an idiot and speculating that he might be America’s Hitler; he then made him his running mate. What worries Trump aides and supporters is that if there is no cost for defying the president, others will see it as a green light to advance their own causes under Trump’s banner, undermining the president’s agenda and leaving Trump to take the blame.
Trump’s first term ended with him impeached twice, banished from social media and cut off from his followers, then subjected to a lawfare campaign designed to imprison him for life. Thousands of his supporters were rounded up in an FBI dragnet that tore apart families and communities. Several January 6 defendants took their own lives rather than face the prospect of prison time, poverty, shame, and further alienation from family and friends. Trump earned more than 70 million votes because he won the trust of an electorate that had been plunged into despair by an invasion at our borders, rigged elections, vaccine mandates, surging crime rates, and a political class that treated his supporters like domestic terrorists in waiting. In large part, he won that trust by being very clear about what he would do once in office.
The president ultimately owes his loyalty to the people who elected him—not to Gabbard or anyone else in his so-called big-tent coalition. If the White House doesn’t turn it around soon, sources say, Trump’s second term could end even worse than the first.
Adam Lehrer is Tablet’s deputy online editor.
Zawartość publikowanych artykułów i materiałów nie reprezentuje poglądów ani opinii Reunion’68,
ani też webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyraźnie zaznaczone.
Twoje uwagi, linki, własne artykuły lub wiadomości prześlij na adres:
webmaster@reunion68.com
