WASHINGTON — National security consultant and conservative media personality Sebastian Gorka, who now serves as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and senior director for counterterrorism, suggests that Trump’s response to his assassination attempt last year was “Christ-like” and an example of “self-sacrifice.”
Gorka addressed a special Conservative Political Action Conference Summit on Ending Christian Persecution at the Kennedy Center on Thursday. His remarks focused on what he characterized as “the real moment” when Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
Gorka recalled how, while Trump was serving at the drive-thru at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in the weeks leading up to the election, he encountered an Asian immigrant who told him, “Thank you for doing everything you do for nobodies like us.” He detailed how the then-presidential candidate responded by assuring him, “No one in America is a nobody.”
Gorka said the immigrant’s wife thanked Trump for “taking a bullet for us,” which prompted the nominee to respond, “Yeah, I guess I did.” Gorka described the president’s response to the McDonald’s customer bringing up the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024 as “an utterly Christian moment.”
“In fact, it was an utter Christ-like moment,” Gorka added, referring to Trump’s recognition of what he called “self-sacrifice” by taking a bullet at the Butler rally. According to Gorka, “What he did that day evinced the heart of a lion and a lion like Aslan.” Gorka clarified that Aslan, a character from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia book series, is intended to represent Jesus.
Some supporters, and even some world leaders, have long compared Trump to biblical figures, such as Nehemiah, Samson or Cyrus the Great, the sixth-century B.C. Persian ruler credited with giving the Jewish people the right to return from exile in Babylon. Critics, however, have questioned the appropriateness of comparing Trump to biblical figures.
In his remarks, Gorka also reflected on a speech delivered by Trump in Warsaw, Poland, early in his first term, where he proclaimed, “The greatest question of the age is whether or not we in the West have the will to fight and defeat those which wish to destroy our civilization.”
“Whether it’s the jihadis that we deal with in the Counterterrorism [Office], whether it’s the cartels that are taking the lives of 110,000 Americans every 12 months, whether it’s the communists that still exist and wish to see us defeated or enslaved, communists outside of America and communists on our campuses inside America, it’s the only question that matters,” Gorka said.
Referring to the threats to religious freedom at home and abroad discussed throughout Thursday’s summit, Gorka maintained that those remarks “put everything you are doing, everything you’ve experienced and everything we face together inside the White House and outside the White House into their correct proper context eternally.”
“We are part of the greatest civilization the world has ever seen, and we are proud to say that. Judeo-Christian civilization is the ultimate form of human existence known to man,” Gorka declared.
Stressing that “there are those who deny what it represents,” Gorka identified “the one thing that binds” the foes of the U.S. as “their denial of objective truth.”
“God is truth,” Gorka added. “If God is truth and you’re a communist, if you’re an atheist, if you’re an anti-American, you have to deny his existence.”
Gorka concluded his address, which wrapped up the entire day of programming, by urging people to “think of that drive-thru window” and “think of that comment” when they “have those dark moments … when you think ‘what more can I give?'” He issued a call to action, reminding the audience, “We have a civilization to save.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
