“We had the enjoyable quasi-grilling of Hillary on the emails, and Trump had a strong performance,” Dr. Sebastian Gorka said of Wednesday night’s national-security forum, on Thursday morning’s Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM.

Gorka suggested Trump “may have been playing with us a little bit” with his positive comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s clearly some sympathy between the two men, but I think it’s one of style,” he said. “I was analyzing the speech afterwards on Fox with General Mike Flynn, and Mike Flynn is very close to the Trump campaign, in terms of advising him. I’ve spoken to the General privately about these issues, and let me tell you, he’s no lover of Vladimir Putin. I think he’s had very frank conversations with Mr. Trump about how Moscow does not share our interests.”

Breitbart Editor-in-Chief and SiriusXM host Alex Marlow suggested Trump was “trolling” with his comments on Putin, and pointed out Clinton has “much more clear-cut” connections to the Russian president.

Gorka agreed that “if there’s anybody who’s in the pocket of the Kremlin, it’s Hillary.”

“Just look at the Clinton Cash revelations, the uranium deal,” he suggested, referencing the book by Peter Schweizer. “It’s just nudge-nudge euphemism, when it comes to Trump and Moscow. With Hillary Clinton, it’s the smoking machine gun on the table, when it comes to how she is purchasable by people such as Putin.”

He advised Trump to project a simple and consistent message, like Ronald Reagan’s game plan of, “We’re going to rebuild the American people’s pride in their nation, and we’re going to beat the Soviets.”

Gorka suggested Trump’s three points could be, “the wall, the economy, and defeating ISIS,” and if he sticks to that message, “he could waltz into the White House, come January.”

He viewed the question Trump was asked at the forum about illegal aliens serving in the military as a “gotcha” question, and doubted it would be a “decisive issue” in the election, because “the average American voter couldn’t care less” about it.

“We have foreign nationals, we have people who got in trouble with the law, who are serving in the U.S. military, for all kinds of reasons – because otherwise they would have gone to prison, or they would have had to wait for years to become a U.S. citizen,” he pointed out.

“This isn’t a new issue. Maybe he was caught off-guard,” Gorka said. “But I think if you look at sanctuary cities, if you look at Kate Steinle’s law – those are the issues Americans care about, when it comes to illegal immigrants, and the future security of the nation. It’s ISIS, it’s the southern border, and Trump will be measured based upon his response to those questions, and his response to those is quite unequivocal.”

Later in the interview, when a caller mentioned the “green-on-blue” attacks U.S. troops have suffered from turncoat members of allied forces in the Middle East, and worried that allowing aliens to serve in the military could create similar security risks, Gorka pointed out that Trump has made enhanced vetting of refugees a major part of his campaign, so “there’s no way he would be saying, I want people who cannot be vetted, and are a potential threat to our own servicemen and our own citizens, filling the recruiting officers or staying inside the U.S. military.”

Dr. Sebastian Gorka is the senior National Security editor for Breitbart News, and author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War.

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

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