By Ben Terris, Marianne LeVine · The Washington Post (c) 2024
Maybe the most powerful man you’ve never heard of is a cherubic 38-year-old immigrant from the small Mediterranean archipelago of Malta whose job right now is to conduct the installation of thousands of Donald Trump’s political appointees, as part of the MAGA-fication of the U.S. government.
His name is Sergio Gor, and he falls somewhere on the spectrum between Renaissance man and henchman.
“I imagine he’s had dinner more in the last year with my father than I have,” says Donald Trump Jr.
“He knows more people than almost anybody I know,” says Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). “Once I went to dinner at his house and I looked at his wall and said, ‘Sergio, is that a picture of you and the pope?’”
“Sergio has a very easy personality,” says Jared Kushner, who rarely comments on the record about anything or anyone, but was happy to have a 20-minute phone conversation about how great Sergio Gor is.“And people trust him.”
Gor is the next director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, an unglamorous position with vast power to help find, vet and hire around 4,000 officials – giving the administration its new shape.
“He’s going to be like the general manager of the government,” says former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz.
Gor’s previous jobs include booker at Fox News, spokesman for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), and officiant of Gaetz’s wedding on Catalina Island.
“It went horribly,” Gaetz says about Gor’s role in making the nuptials official. When Gor signed the marriage documents, he did so with John Hancockian flair – and his signature was so big that it swooped outside the designated box.
“The state of California rejected my wedding,” Gaetz says. “I had to have Sergio sign them again.”
Gor might not be known to the public at large, but he’s well known in Trumpland. He has been dubbed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago” (due to his time spent at Trump’s Florida club) and the “Patio Panhandler” (due to his time soliciting super-PAC funds from fellow club members). He referred to Trump as “my friend” at the infamous Madison Square Garden pre-election rally, and he’s known as one of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers.
“Even during that exile period after 2020, Sergio was right by the president’s side,” says Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist with close ties to both Gor and the Trumps. “Sergio was there when other people ran away.”
And he kept the party going during Trump’s four-year exile by DJing MAGA parties throughout Palm Beach. Gor is the “life of every social gathering he graces,” Gaetz says. “I have never been to a Sergio DJ party where a conga line doesn’t break out.”Gor once took over the DJ booth at a stuffy affair filled with conservative luminaries whom Gaetz would not name, and, by the end of the night, “the roof came off, people were jumping in the pool and making out in the hot tub.”
Still, Gaetz says, it would be a mistake to underestimate the man with the big signature and bigger personality.
“Don’t let the social stuff fool you,” the former congressman says. “He’s ruthlessly efficient.”
And, according to some former colleagues, Gor is just plain ruthless.
Knowing people is a key part of any personnel job. And it’s time for everyone to know Sergio Gor.
Gor, who declined to be interviewed, does not have to go through his own official vetting for this job. But if he did, his initial references would be impeccable:
“He gets along with everybody in Trump’s orbit,” Kirk says. “Which is very unusual. Jared, Ivanka, Don, Eric, the president. He’s an incredibly agreeable figure in Trumpworld, which will make the personnel job a great fit.”
“It was nice of Sergio to come visit me in prison,” says Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, via email. “But even more thoughtful how he helped my fiancé through our prison time.” (When asked, Navarro did not elaborate).
“A fun presence would be an understatement,” Don Jr. says.
Kellyanne Conway says that President-elect Trump “describes Sergio as a guy who makes things happen.”
An incredible number of people reached out to volunteer compliments about Gor. This is unusual for a profile of a prominent figure in Trump’s orbit, especially with a media outlet that the president-elect has derided and attacked. It says something about Gor’s fun-loving personality, or about the breadth of his sudden power – or both.
“He has the president’s full trust and full confidence, and very few others have that outside of President Trump’s own family,” says Monica Crowley, who called when she heard this story was in the works. Then, a few hours after the call, she was announced as Trump’s pick for chief of protocol, which comes with an ambassador rank.
“Are you writing something about Sergio?” a spokesman for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) texted, two days before this story was published. “My boss might want to weigh in.”
There’s plenty of amusing Gor lore. There’s the time Gor bet Don Jr. $500 that he wouldn’t jump into a Louisiana swamp filled with 13-foot alligators. (“I stripped down and jumped in,” Don Jr. says.) There’s the ritual of Gor singing “Phantom of the Opera” songs with Trump on the club’s patio. There’s the time Gor and Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, after a night at Mar-a-Lago, got kicked out of Flanigan’s Seafood Bar and Grill for throwing french fries at other guests. Wren did the throwing, she says, and Gor just egged her on.
“It’s pretty hard to get kicked out of a Flanigan’s – some would say impossible,” Wren says. “But we did it.” (Wren later tried to retract the anecdote, saying that she talked to Gor and that he, in fact, did nothing wrong and was not kicked out.)
Before he became a MAGA man, Gor worked at Fox News, then for a handful of House conservatives – including Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), known chiefly for incendiary rhetoric – before landing in the office of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) in 2013. With all his media connections, Gor was wildly successful getting Paul booked for TV and radio interviews, and he quickly earned his boss’s trust.
Gor is not without detractors, however. Four people who worked with him in Congress – and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal – all separately described him as a sweet-talking backstabber, bent on accruing power.
Says one ex-colleague, to prove the point: “He had a beagle named Machiavelli.”
In a 2016 Buzzfeed News report on Paul’s failed presidential run, reporters spoke to five sources in Paul’s office who described serious tension between Gor and the rest of the staff; members of the press shop moved to the basement of the campaign headquarters just to get away from him.
In one instance, reported here for the first time, he had an altercation with a staffer that left her deeply rattled.
“Sergio found out that a speechwriter made more money than him, and he wanted to take her down,” says one former Paul staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about a sensitive situation. The speechwriter was Elise Jordan, the widow of Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, who died in a 2013 car crash. One day in the office, according to two people with knowledge of the incident, Gor pulled up a conspiracy theorist’s narrated YouTube video of the car crash and started playing it loudly for Jordan to hear.
“What really happened, Elise?” Gor asked her, according to one former staffer who heard. “What really happened to your husband?”
Jordan was “visibly shaken up,” says another former staffer, and was “telling him to stop, and he wouldn’t.” Jordan confirmed this account to The Washington Post but declined further comment. (Says Trump transition spokesman Steven Cheung: “Elise Jordan is a Never Trumper, who has been a paid contributor at MSNBC for many years. Anything she says should be taken with a very big grain of salt.”)
Around that time, a member of Paul’s staff created and circulated a dossier that was critical of Gor’s way of doing business, hoping for media coverage of certain allegations – but those were neither proved nor grabby enough for reporters to bite.
None of this got in the way of Gor’s rise in politics, because he left the hidebound Senate for a realm where having enemies can be an asset, especially in the service of loyalty: Trumpworld. In 2020, Gor joined Trump’s fundraising operation. In 2021, after Trump had difficulty landing a memoir deal with one of the Big Five publishing houses, according to Politico, Gor started a conservative press, Winning Team Publishing, with Don Jr.
Winning Team’s latest product is a 360-page photo book titled “Save America,” with a bloodied Trump raising his fist on the cover. Editions signed by Trump retailed at $499.
“He’s super hands-on,” says Kirk, who published his own book with Gor. “And he really filled a void. Conservative books sell much more than liberal books, but you need a place that isn’t afraid they are going to get canceled.”
Since 2022, Gor has owned a house in Florida in driving distanceto Mar-a-Lago. It was prime real estate for Gor, who was able to use his connection to Trump and various fellow club members to fundraise for a super PAC called Right for America, to support the 2024 campaign. Some members of Trump’s inner circle thought the operation was a play for money and influence, and a possible distraction from established fundraising operations. Some of these people griped anonymously to the Daily Beast at the time, bestowing Gor with the “Patio Panhandler” nickname and accusing him of only being in the game to enrich himself.
But the PAC raised a ton of money for Trump: about $72.4 million this year, according to Federal Election Commission reports, which offer no evidence that Gor made money for himself. In any event, when your side wins, no one really cares whether your motives are pure or Machiavellian.
Gor’s prize for being on the winning team is a role that can be, according to Jonathan McBride, “an incredibly powerful position.” McBride served as director of the Presidential Personnel Office under President Barack Obama and says a trusted head of PPO can often “speak on behalf of the president” about who deserves which position. It is, in other words, a dream job for an able networker and social climber in Washington.
“It is natural for folks – especially those in the first Cabinet – to all feel like they owe you for getting the job,” McBride says.
Gor, however, will not be managing the small group of Cabinet nominees. He is charged with vetting thousands of candidates for second-tier positions (anything below the Cabinet secretary level). They will meet with Gor, his team and volunteers (including, on occasion, Trump-loving titans of industry such as Elon Musk or the tech billionaire Marc Andreessen). Aspirants will be graded on factors such as policy chops and allegiance to Trump. (Points are awarded, according to a person involved, based on whether they voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024.)
“Loyalty has got to be number one,” says Don Jr., who adds that the 2016 transition wasn’t strict enough on loyalty. Too many people got jobs then simply because they “had an R next to their name,” Don Jr. says, only to turn out as perceived turncoats.
Not this time, Don Jr. says, and Gor will see to it.
“He will diligently go through and understand not just where were they in 2015 and 2016, but where were they on January 7th,” Don Jr. says, referring to the day after the 2021 riot at the Capitol. “What were they doing and saying at that time?”
During Trump’s first transition, Kushner says, the director of PPO faced a huge obstacle: People didn’t want to come work for Trump’s nascent government, which seemed accidental and haphazard.
“We could barely give away ambassadorships,” Kushner says. But now, “there are basically 20 people competing for every job” – and it will be up to Gor to determine who’s worthy and loyal.
“The benefit of him having a strong relationship with Donald Trump,” Kushner says, “is that he knows him well enough to know what he’ll care about and what he won’t care about, so he doesn’t have to go to him with every little decision.”
Gor knows what Trump is looking for – because, in a lot of ways, Trump is simply looking for more Gors.
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Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.