TRUMP'S ENVOY, NOT AMERICA'S AMBASSADOR

When Sergio Gor landed in New Delhi last week, the optics spoke louder than his words.

- RAKESH K. CHITKARA

Barely 38, visibly nervous, and calling himself “Trump's ambassador”, he arrived not as a diplomat but as an emissary of loyalty. India has hosted seasoned strategists, scholars, business leaders, and senior political figures from Washington. Never before has it received someone so young, so politically raw, and so personally tethered to a U.S. President whose worldview is defined by deal-making and disruption.

This appointment seems less about diplomacy and more about being Trump's eyes and ears in a region where power is visibly shifting from West to East. His posting tells us what the new Washington wants—not nuanced partnerships, but personal control. Until recently, he was a political operative running the White House Presidential Personnel Office—the machinery that decides who gets jobs and who gets fired. The Washington Post profiled him last year as “the most powerful man you've never heard of”—a gatekeeper whose loyalty to Trump was total and whose reach extended through every department. Efficient, ambitious, and feared, he was said to blend charm with ruthlessness.

That résumé makes him a formidable political soldier—but hardly a diplomat. His career is steeped in domestic trench warfare, not global diplomacy. Reports have questioned even the basics of his public biography: born in Soviet Tashkent as Sergio Gorokhovsky, not Malta as once claimed; late to file a security clearance while vetting others; and accused by colleagues of mixing power with paranoia. In short, he is the quintessential Trump man—devoted, daring, and dangerously inexperienced in the delicate craft of international statecraft.

Yet that, precisely, may be why Trump chose him. This is not a man sent to understand India; this is a man sent to report India.