National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was removed this week but a key Trump counterterrorism official remains in place at the White House — and he’s planning a change in strategy to focus on jihadists rather than white supremacist groups that one leading expert said remain a significant domestic threat.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “We all understand why the right doesn’t want to tackle domestic violent extremism — it’s their base.”
The Trump official is Sebastian Gorka, an Anglo-Hungarian-American academic who spent seven months in the first Trump White House as a national security strategist before being removed. Closely connected to Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Gorka’s far-right views have proved consistently controversial. His return to the White House generated protests from former Trump advisers, who called him names including “conman” and “clown.”
Regardless, Gorka is promising a new policy focused on “killing jihadis,” thereby downplaying, if not altogether abandoning, a Biden-era emphasis on white supremacist threats.
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Alternet: ‘Sad white boys’: Fear as Trump terror adviser shrugs off threat from ‘inside the house’
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was removed this week but a key Trump counterterrorism official remains in place at the White House — and he’s planning a change in strategy to focus on jihadists rather than white supremacist groups that one leading expert said remain a significant domestic threat.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “We all understand why the right doesn’t want to tackle domestic violent extremism — it’s their base.”
Alternet: ‘Pushed me over the edge’: Here’s why MAGA is enraged at the Trump administration
Awwww, the poor babies who should still be in prison are distraught:
“The anger and depression is hitting hard today,” Richard Barnett, a self-described white nationalist who was sentenced to 54 months in prison for raiding the Capitol on Jan. 6, wrote on X on Monday. Barnett, who was among some 1,500s rioters pardoned by Trump, complained that Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino “stabbed us in the back” and “actually promoted one of our tormenters, Steve Jensen, into a position of great power within the FBI.”