A Loyalist's Loyalist in Charge of Personnel

Yahoo

19-11-2024

In 2008, Sergio Gor was a young political staffer dressing up as a squirrel—complete with a big head and dopey cartoonish rodent face—and taunting Democratic politicians. Today, he's about to be one of the most powerful aides in Donald Trump's White House.
Gor, a 37-year-old journeyman in Republican politics, is part of the president-elect's inner circle. He spends time at Mar-a-Lago, publishes Trump's books, and jockeys for influence in Trump's cutthroat political operation. He ran one of the lesser-known but well-funded super PACs supporting Trump's election, Right for America. Despite working on Capitol Hill during the first Trump administration, he was frequently spotted either at the White House or down in Palm Beach, usually alongside Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
So it's no surprise that last week the Trump transition team announced that Gor has been named director of the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), the White House's clearinghouse for appointments and staffing. The post means he will be in charge of vetting the roughly 4,000 administration appointments, including more than 1,000 that require Senate confirmation. As Trump has vowed to make sure his second presidency is not hampered by the supposed disloyalty of the career Republicans who helped staff up his administration the first time, having a loyalist's loyalist like Gor at PPO will be key.
'It's a hugely important role,' said Tevi Troy, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration. 'When you're staffing an administration, you have to hire thousands of people. There's got to be some clearinghouse that determines whether someone is capable of doing the job, do they have loyalty to the administration and its goals, and most importantly, are they going to embarrass the administration.'
At the beginning of Trump's first White House stint, the role was held by Johnny DeStefano, a veteran of several Republican offices on Capitol Hill, including former House Speaker John Boehner. DeStefano was an able and well-regarded aide who earned the president's trust over time as his remit expanded to include additional jobs, including counselor to the president and heading up the Office of the Public Liaison. But DeStefano left for the private sector in 2019, and in the final year of Trump's first term, the post went to a more dedicated Trump acolyte, his former personal aide John McEntee.
McEntee had actually been fired from the White House in 2018 after his security clearance was held up over 'problems related to online gambling and mishandling of his taxes,' as the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. But less than two years later, he was back in, this time at PPO, and this time with a vengeance.
McEntee was there to enforce Trump's charge to rid his administration of 'Never Trumpers' and other malcontents not on board with the MAGA philosophy. In the summer of 2020, a few months after taking on the job, McEntee's office let it be known that current senior administration officials would need to submit to interviews that were nothing more than thinly veiled loyalty tests. As the journalist Jonathan Karl put it in his book Betrayal, 'Some Trump aides privately compared the PPO to the East German Stasi or even the Gestapo—always on the lookout for traitors within.' Even Trump Cabinet members had concerns about McEntee's efforts to cull the ranks, which mostly went nowhere after Trump lost reelection.
Trump isn't taking any chances this time, which makes Gor's new post all the more important. Gor declined to comment, but Steven Cheung, the administration's incoming communications director, said the PPO director's vision is to help Trump 'staff his Administration with high-caliber, intelligent, and patriotic individuals who will work tirelessly to Make America Great Again.'
Gor came to MAGA world as a committed and eager Republican. He was a junior staffer at the Republican National Committee in 2008, one of the young employees tasked with wearing the squirrel costume at public events during the campaign season to draw attention to Barack Obama's ties to the activist group ACORN. The RNC squirrels were attention-seeking spectacles, showing up in swing states or in the crowds on morning news shows as political merry pranksters. They even had a blog.
It's the kind of humbling entry-level work in politics that only the most dedicated (and maybe shameless) are willing to do. But it was an early indication of just how loyal—to the party, to the cause, to the principal—Gor could be. Those who like him say Gor is a hard-working networker with a knack for getting into the rooms where things happen and a willingness to do the unglamorous work of politics.
'Sergio was asked to do a wide array of things that were extraordinarily menial,' said Liz Mair, a Republican strategist who worked with Gor at the RNC in 2008. 'He knows how to network and get ahead.'
But others say Gor's ambitions outstrip his skills as a political operator, and he relies on sycophancy and overconfidence to rise in Trumpworld. One frequent word used by his many detractors is 'weird.'
'He's very strange. Donors love him. His relationships are interesting,' said one former colleague who worked with Gor on the 2020 Trump campaign. 'He's definitely different.'
Part of Gor's oddness comes from his unclear background. A professing Catholic who tells others he grew up on the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta, Gor graduated from high school in suburban Los Angeles. There, and early during his time attending George Washington University (GW), he went by the last name Gorokhovsky, which he later shortened. Those who have known him personally say that before immigrating from Malta he had been born in the Soviet Union.
At some point, Gor's interest in Republican politics and conservative activism—he was involved in both the College Republicans at GW and the school's chapter of the Young America's Foundation—grew into a career.
There was the stint at the RNC after graduating from college, then some time on Capitol Hill, working for Republicans as diverse as the defense hawk Rep. Randy Forbes and the conservative populist firebrands Reps. Michele Bachmann and Steve King. For two years, Gor moved up to New York to work for Fox News, where the roots of his connections to Trumpworld began. He worked closely with Guilfoyle, a contributor and co-host at the network.
Then it was back to Washington where Gor held his longest job, working for the libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul. Under Paul, he rose to the position of top spokesman and became well known to the Capitol Hill press corps as a fierce defender of his boss. But after Trump was elected in 2016, Gor found himself moving into the new president's orbit. His past professional relationship with Guilfoyle gave him entrée with her new boyfriend, Donald Trump Jr.
When Trump left the White House in 2021 and decamped for South Florida, Gor followed. He and Don Jr. started Winning Team Publishing, a boutique house that has published a handful of books, including some coffee table books by the former president. Among those are Our Journey Together, which contains photographs from his four years in the White House, and Save America, the cover of which features the iconic photograph of Trump's raised fist in the air following the July assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Current retail price: $99.)
But Gor's departure into political publishing appears over as he prepares to return to Washington and help determine who will staff Trump's Washington. Mair, the former RNC employee who worked with Gor, says she's encouraged by the appointment.
'I do think we'll be better off with him in that role than a ton of other people who could have ended up there,' she said.
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