White House Rebuffed DHS Attempts by to Combat Domestic Terrorism

Despite requests from local politicians that he stay away, Donald Trump traveled to both Dayton, Ohio - which he referred to as Toledo earlier in the week - and El Paso, Texas, today.  White House officials claimed the trips were to "honor victims" and to praise first responders even thought Trump in typical fashion ended up attacking opponents and Democrats and never once apologized for his own incendiary language that was paraphrased by the El Paso shooter. Thankfully, many protesters came out to oppose Trump's visit although one would never know this if they only watched Trump TV, a/k/a Fox News where Tucker Carlson called "white supremacy a "hoax."  As CNN is reporting, for over a year, the Trump?pence regime has blocked Department of Homeland Security efforts to beef up efforts to counter domestic terrorism, most of which involved some form of white supremacy. One should never be duped by Trump's disingenuous and insincere remarks about the latest mass shootings.  His regime has encouraged white supremacist violence and blocked efforts to stop it.  Here are highlights from CNN:

White House officials rebuffed efforts by their colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a year to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority as specifically spelled out in the National Counterterrorism Strategy, current and former senior administration officials as well as other sources close to the Trump administration tell CNN.

"Homeland Security officials battled the White House for more than a year to get them to focus more on domestic terrorism," one senior source close to the Trump administration tells CNN. "The White House wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat which, while serious, ignored the reality that racial supremacist violence was rising fast here at home. They had major ideological blinders on."
 "Ultimately the White House just added one paragraph about domestic terrorism as a throw-away line," a senior source involved in the discussion told CNN. That paragraph mentions "other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism." It made no mention of white supremacists. (A separate paragraph in the report mentions investigating domestic terrorists with connections to overseas terrorists, but that does not seem to be a reference to white supremacists.)

The document mentions that domestic terrorism is on the rise, but the subject is only briefly addressed, all the more stark given that FBI Director Christopher Wray's July testimony that there have been almost as many domestic terror arrests in the first three quarters of the fiscal year -- about 100 -- as there have been arrests connected to international terror. Wray noted that the majority of the domestic terrorism cases were motivated by some version of white supremacist violence, adding that the FBI takes the threat "extremely seriously."
 Said a current senior Trump administration official, "DHS is surging resources to the [domestic terrorism] issue, but they're behind the curve because of lack of support from the White House.

Critics of President Donald Trup hit out at the White House's lack of support for the department's attempts at combating domestic terrorism, including multiple Democratic presidential candidates. "People are getting killed, and this President is turning a blind eye to America's national security threats," said California Sen. Kamala Harris on Twitter. Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, another presidential candidate, who is from El Paso, tweeted, "Despite the evidence, despite the threat to our country that domestic terrorism poses, this president did nothing. He made us less safe." Why the White House pushed back so much is a matter of some debate. The former senior administration official noted that the White House, specifically the President, has a problem criticizing white supremacy, and says he "didn't have expectation they would get behind it" -- the brief mention of domestic terrorism as a threat in the National Counterterrorism Strategy -- "because the preponderance of it involves white supremacy and that's not something this administration is comfortable speaking out against, until the other day by the President and even that was pretty hedged."

The senior source close to the Trump administration acknowledged the President's reluctance to criticize white supremacists was part of "an overlay" of all these discussions.  "You know it will trigger the boss," the source said. "Instinctively you know he's going to be averse to mentioning that."
 During the lengthy back and forth, the senior source tells CNN, one White House official proposed that the National Counterterrorism Strategy focus radical Islamists and foreign drug dealers, since that would please the President.   "But those things don't go together," the source recalled. "That was part of the warped worldview they had there."

Like it or not, everything Trump - and Pence - does involves the issue of skin color.  If the terrorists are white, expect the White House to block responsible actions to counter the threat to the general population.  Why?  Because a large segment of Trump's base is comprised of white supremacists.