Why Trump Is Soft on White-Supremacist Terrorism ByJonathan Chait
Why Trump Is Soft on White-Supremacist Terrorism
By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/trump-white-supremacist-terrorism-synagogue-mosque-shooting.html?fbclid=IwAR1qYlAvP5yvvEydkjiOUxcQuVhNBA2KxBIgx1878iOIjunwwc-26kRFcnA
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The right’s primary objection to the report was in the link it posited between violent extremism on the one hand and the backlash against Obama and the federal government on the other. “It’s no small coincidence that Napolitano’s agency – referring to Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano – “disseminated the assessment just a week before the nationwide April 15 Tax Day Tea Party protests,” argued Michelle Malkin. The Drudge Report hyped the story with a banner warning, “She Is Watching You.” John Boehner insisted Napolitano “owes the American people an explanation for why she has abandoned using the term ‘terrorist’ to describe those, such as al Qaeda, who are plotting overseas to kill innocent Americans, while her own Department is using the same term to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.”
This episode took place at a time when Republicans were committed to presenting the tea party as a movement of principled deficit hawks sincerely concerned about inflation and debt-financed outlays. Yet their backlash against the Homeland Security paper reflected their recognition of a political affinity between their brand of anti-Obama panic and the violent kind identified by the department. The paper did not make the connection between tea-party protests and paranoid or violent extremism; Republicans drew the connection themselves.
The dynamic has only intensified in the Trump era. At a hearing on white-supremacist terrorism earlier this month, Republicans kept derailing the conversation. “Every time Democrats talked about President Trump’s anti-immigrant remarks, or how government agencies should do more to fight the spread of white nationalism, Republicans pivoted to criticism of identity politics, anti-Semitism on the left and off-topic foreign policy issues,” reported NPR.
Republicans do not wish to defend white supremacists, but they feel enough kinship with them to treat them as political allies and to consider measures directed against them as a shared threat. The way you can tell Republicans are soft on white-supremacist terrorism is that white-supremacist terrorism is a partisan issue.
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