George W. Bush was rightly criticized when he failed to act when handed a memo entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.”
But Donald Trump did more than just ignore this memo.
White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence …
“We assess lone actors and small cells within the White Supremacist Extremist (WSE) movement likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.”
The memo presented 2016 as a year in which at least four significant WSE attacks occurred, but also a year in which we were lucky, with an increased chance of deadly attacks in the future. It pointed out that white supremacists were the most dangerous terrorists to Americans over the last 16 years.
Trump didn’t act. In fact, by that point Trump had already opened the door for violent white supremacists.
The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism … would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.
The program, called Countering Violent Extremism, has since crumbled into the kind of chaos that seems to follow in Trump’s wake, leaving it ineffective against any group. Action underway by the Obama administration has been halted and the budget for the program has since been cut to exactly $0. But that’s just one of the actions Trump has taken to make life easier for radical white nationalists.
The Trump regime has consistently worked to downplay the threat of violence from white supremacists.
Sebastian Gorka, a self-described terrorism expert, told the Breitbart News Daily radio show on Wednesday that “[t]here has never been a serious attack or a serious plot that was unconnected from ISIS or al-Qaeda.” …
Gorka’s comments also willfully ignore several high-profile lone wolf terror attacks committed by non-Muslim white men, including the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and Dylann Roof’s slaying of nine African American churchgoers in Charleston in 2015.
While Gorka’s words might seem extreme, there are other contenders among Trump’s crew.
In an interview rife with hyperbole, perhaps the most eye-opening moment came when [Trump adviser Roger] Stone insisted to Letson: “There are no white supremacists, my friend.”
Stone went on to clarify that white supremacists are “a tiny microcosm of the United States.” He also claimed that “The Ku-Klux Klan today is funded by the federal government.”
If by that Stone means that the KKK is being helped by Donald Trump … that’s hard to argue.