We “shall not live by bread alone,” Jesus said. No, we want more; we want, like Homer Simpson, to experience “the terrifying lows” and “the dizzying highs.” We want blood and guts and meaningful struggle. In civilian life, we seek out surrogate versions of such thrills at the movies. But we’re also, increasingly, finding them in the melodrama of politics — and few are so adept at giving the daily news a cinematic sheen as Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump official whose online commentary makes it sound as though the world were teetering on a razor’s edge at every hour of every day.

Gorka, who is sometimes jokingly compared to a Bond villain, is over six feet tall, with splenetic brows and a vast goatee. In a video he posted online at the end of May, he is dressed casually, having traded his usual dark suit for a dark crew neck. The room he’s in is almost completely dark; slices of white doorjamb and molding suggest it’s a finished basement. His body is turned slightly away from the camera, as though we’ve stumbled upon him in the midst of interrogating a terrorist or defusing a bomb. “I knew this day would come,” Gorka says. “But I didn’t expect it so soon.” His melodious baritone — so saturated with the earmarks of erudition that it sounds as if he’s reading an audiobook about dragons — is somber, full of portent. “The president has brought forth his decision,” he announces. “And the kraken has been unleashed.”