Former White House staffers Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon spoke at the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voter Summit (VVS) today, where they delivered speeches intended to galvanize the Religious Right against the establishment Republican Party to elect politicians who will support President Donald Trump’s campaign agenda.
Gorka spoke about his time as an advisor to Trump and discussed his latest efforts to help the “Make America Great Again” agenda from outside the White House. Part of that effort, Gorka told the crowd, is unseating Republican congressmen who oppose Trump and fighting back against what he claimed is a dishonest mainstream media that aims to destroy Trump.
“2018 will be the crucial year. This is the year Steve has declared war on the RINO class, as have I, and we must tell them we have had enough,” Gorka said. Gorka also claimed that the founding fathers wouldn’t have “bothered to fight the British” if they imagined senators and representatives would stay in Washington for decades at a time.
Gorka also alluded to the possibility that he and Bannon still communicate with Trump.
“Does anybody in this room think that the only people that the president talks to are people who have a government ID badge?” Gorka said. “I can tell you he doesn’t just talk to those people.”
Bannon followed Gorka, recruiting the Religious Right to aid his agenda to dismantle the establishment GOP. Bannon told the audience at VVS that ensuring the president’s success was not his war, but rather “our war.”
“You all didn’t start it. The establishment started it,” Bannon said. “But I will tell you one thing: You all are going to finish it.”
As part of Bannon’s appeal to the Religious Right, he credited the movement as the “key that picked the lock” to Trump’s success in many battleground states in the 2016 election. Bannon told the crowd that evangelical and Catholic turnout in key districts was “the difference in victory.”
“There’s a time and season for everything. And right now, it’s a season of war against a GOP establishment,” Bannon said, to the applause of the VVS audience.
If the Religious Right helps his push, Bannon said, members of the movement will be “the folks who saved the Judeo-Christian West.”
