When President Trump and his staff talk about groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, they always come back to one argument: The need to call the Islamist threat by its name.
“These are radical Islamic terrorists,” Trump said in October. “To solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is, or at least say the name.”
Yet after the alt-right rally in Charlottesville on Friday, and even after a neo-Nazi plowed a car into counterprotesters on Saturday morning, the president merely blamed “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” It took him until Monday afternoon, after days of intense criticism from the press and even many Republicans, to condemn “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.”
Experts on extremism see this as part of a disturbing pattern: The president seems to love calling out Islamist violence but is curiously hesitant to call white supremacist violence by its name.
“It’s night and day,” says Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “He pulls his Twitter finger in a second when there’s an [Islamist] attack like Manchester or Nice ... but he doesn’t apply the same standard to white supremacy.”
This is not a minor point. Trump’s insistence on using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” was always seen by terrorism experts as a mistake, as the phrase inaccurately implies that groups like ISIS speak for the entirety of the Muslim religion. They argued that using the phrase alienates Muslim allies in the fight against extremism.
By contrast, Trump’s unwillingness to label white supremacists as such encourages those groups and their followers. They see President Trump as a tacit ally; alt-right leader Richard Spencer once said the president has a “psychic connection” with his movement. Trump’s “all lives matter” approach to white nationalist violence sends a signal that he’s at least sympathetic to their views.
“The administration's fixation on saying ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ was always a popular talking point among white nationalists,” J.M. Berger, a fellow at the International Center for Counterterrorism who studies domestic American extremism, says.
“When combined with the president's obvious reluctance to criticize white nationalists, it's pretty obvious what's happening here.”
The Trump double standard
For as long has Trump has been in national politics, his reaction to Islamist terrorism has been swift and extreme.
His December 2015 proposal for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” was in direct response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack that had happened days earlier. After the shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in June 2016, Trump tweeted that he appreciated “the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” and called for the federal government to begin surveilling “the mosques” inside the United States.
This pattern continued after he took the presidency — even extending to foreign terrorist attacks.
