Who is Sergio Gor?

Let Us Now Celebrate Another MAGA Immigrant Story While They Continue to Detain Hundreds of Innocent People

“I have a couple of dreams in life – and this was on top,” the Uzbeki-born son of Soviet emigres told an L.A. reporter at his citizenship ceremony in 2006. “It’s something you look forward to from the day of arrival. … In history class, you look at all these immigrants who came with rags and accomplished so much. Becoming a citizen is a step toward the great American dream.”

Those were the heartwarming words of the man currently staffing the most anti-immigrant administration in modern US history. As White House personnel director, Sergio Gor holds immense decision-making power, as the Washington Post puts it, “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” He has hired approximately 4,000 loyalty-tested MAGA foot soldiers.

But recently, after a feud with Elon Musk, questions about Gor’s security clearance and evasiveness about his birthplace made the news. The Times of Malta and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) discovered that he was born in 1986 as Sergio Gorokhovsky in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of the Soviet Union, to parents who identified themselves as Ukrainian (dad) and Israeli (mom). The family moved to Malta and then emigrated to the U.S. when Gor was 12 – landing in LA in the late 90s, where notorious nativist Stephen Miller, destined to become the cackling Nosferatu behind the Trump administration’s masked thugs and the 3,000 a day immigrant removal program, was also hatching.

When the LA Daily News interviewed young Sergio, he was clad in a navy-blue, pin-striped suit, a red shirt, and a red tie with hearts that depicted the American flag and the words “I love you” and “I love America.” The reporter chatted with him at a Los Angeles office where he was getting naturalized.

As an immigrant teen, Sergio was full red, white, and blue: at Canoga Park High School, Gor was an avid joiner: President of Canoga Park Future Farmers of America, an Air Force Jr. ROTC cadet, a member of the “Young Senators” program created by State Senator Richard Alarcón. At the time of his interview at his citizenship ceremony, he was a sophomore at George Washington University and said he was a White House intern in the George W. Bush administration, a position that was only open to U.S. citizens. (Notably, it’s unclear from available info whether he was an intern before his citizenship ceremony or only after.)

Gor’s father, Yuri Gorokovsky (sometimes spelled Goroshovsky), worked as an aviation engineer designing aircraft for the Soviet military. In a 2007 announcement related to his hiring, a private military-connected enterprise, Tactical Air Defense Services (TADS), called Gorokovsky “the original Lead Engineer Designer of the world famous IL-76 Supertanker.” The American startup also noted that he had “served the Israeli intelligence organization as an Aviation Professional Consultant,” and “maintains extensive contacts within the Russian and United States aviation industries.”

The IL-76, a midair refueling supertanker, was manufactured in Tashkent, where the Gorokovsky family lived when Sergio was born.

The story of that now-defunct American company and its Russian military super-jet involves a cast of shady characters, including Midwest mobsters and casino owners who invested in it, possibly to profit off the private contracts connected to the war in Afghanistan. The aircraft itself is still rotting on a runway in a tiny Michigan airport, where it has been for 15 years, after having been detained while en route to Pakistan for unknown purposes in 2009, carrying eleven Ukrainians, some of whom were immediately deported.

(You can read the full twisted story of the company and the plane here.)

During his teen years, Gor, who seems to have changed the spelling of his last name around the time of his U.S. citizenship, clearly considered himself of Russian heritage, using the email address "russumalti." It’s not clear that he speaks Russian, but the Maltese reporters interviewed neighbors who recalled referring to him as “the Russian boy” when he was living there.

But these days, he’s not so proud of that heritage, going to lengths to avoid revealing it. As recently as last summer, in the Washington Post profile, he was from Malta.

As of this June, it appears that Gor, despite his position, did not have a security clearance. Administration “insiders” told the New York Post that Gor had not turned in his Standard Form 86 – a more than 100-page set of questions required for officials who need security clearances. According to the Post, Gor “‘strongly opposed’ the use of the SF-86, claiming he was concerned about the ‘deep state’ weeding out Trump’s picks” and contended that Trump could use executive authority to clear anyone.

Gor clearly considered himself to have passed the only vetting one truly needs to work in the Trump White House: Trump likes him. He’s a Mar a Lago regular and has been for years, he has raised a lot of money for The Boss, and he’s real tight with Donald Trump Jr. Together, Gor and Don Jr. operate a right wing publishing company called Winning Team, and Gor is such a pal that he was one of a small coterie of buddies, along with Charlie Kirk, invited to travel to Greenland on the Trump Force One expeditionary stunt in January.

Quite possibly, Gor’s shyness about his heritage has to do with the enduring suspicion that the Trump clan is too cozy with Moscow. He accompanied Sen. Rand Paul to Moscow in 2018 on a Cato Institute junket, a “fact-finding trip to research, discuss and explore issues related to Russia and the U.S.” At the time, Gor was the Senator’s comms director. He stayed on in Russia for an additional five days, traveling more than 1,700 kilometers east and flying out of Yekaterinburg, according to government records. The OCCRP also found Gor traveled to Moscow in 2017, based on what the reporting consortium called “leaked Russian border records.” Those records indicate he flew from D.C. to Moscow on Aeroflot and left the next day for Rome. Gor’s lawyer apparently asked the OCCRP to clarify their reporting about that trip, stating that Gor is just “an avid traveler.”

Gor’s birthplace, family connections, and travel would certainly titillate a Cold War-era mole-hunter. But this is 2025, not 1975 – despite the efforts of MAGA time-traveling zombies who fling the epithet “communist” at everyone left of Sean Hannity.

In a weird sequence of events, two nights ago on the MAGA Freakshow Center Stage that is Infowars, Alex Jones and “Secretary of Retribution” Ivan Raiklin ripped into Gor, accusing him of unspecified loyalty breaches, not being MAGA enough, and hinting at some “gay” sex scandal. A day later, both men retracted their statements.

All the above is not meant to infer that the Gor / Gorokovsky family were or are anything but superlative American newcomers. With a boy in the Trump White House, their red, white, and blue bona fides are impeccable.

What the family story does suggest, however, is that the White House personnel director knows better than most Americans what an actual “communist” is, and therefore ought to, if not correct, at least cringe every time the MAGA right flings the C-word at Americans simply because they aren’t down with the pathological cruelty and social Darwinism of the Project 2025 agenda.

Furthermore, as usual, let us marvel at the hypocrisy of celebrating one’s own family flight from distant repression and violence to American peace and prosperity while also participating in the project of dispatching masked thugs to arrest more recent newcomers. As with Stephen Miller, whose family fled the pogroms of Europe for the American dream, the hypocrisy of these non-Mayflower Trumpers yanking up the ladder behind them is stunning to behold.

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