On Monday night, President Donald Trump welcomed Seb Gorka back into the White House—not for a job, but for a meal.
The president was joined for dinner in the White House residence by Fox News personalities, including host Jesse Watters and Gorka, a former White House official and aide to former chief strategist Steve Bannon. According to a White House official and two other sources familiar with the meeting, President Trump invited Gorka and Watters because “he couldn’t get enough of them on TV,” as one source put it, and wanted to confab with them about what he’d seen on Fox News, politics, gossip, and his administration.
On Thursday night, Watters tweeted out an image of a menu—which includes a dessert of milk chocolate mousse—signed by Donald J. Trump, reading, “To Jesse[,] You are great!”
“It was so lit,” another source added, referring to the Trump-Gorka-Watters summit. The source said the president joked that he “missed” Gorka.
Gorka, Watters, and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to requests for comment.
Gorka’s return to the White House, and his new episode of facetime with President Trump, comes months after he was booted from the administration, a week after the ouster of his boss Bannon, by Chief of Staff John Kelly. The Wall Street Journal noted on Friday that in recent weeks, Trump loyalists such as Corey Lewandowski, Trump fired first 2016 campaign manager, and Gorka have “had West Wing meetings with Mr. Trump.”
To his detractors, Gorka, currently a Fox News contributor, is an academic fraud, an anti-Muslim zealot, and even an ally to Nazi and fascist sympathizers who never should have set foot on White House grounds.
To President Trump and Gorka’s legion of conservative admirers, he is a fan-favorite. Trump continues to see Gorka often on Fox, often on Hannity, and to tell associates how much of a kick he gets out of watching Gorka on cable news.
