A Year Before Alleged White Nationalist-Linked School Shooting, Trump Cut Funds To Fight Right-Wing Terrorism
Nearly one year ago, Donald Trump quietly slashed funding to fight right-wing terrorism, a move that critics said severely hampered the ability to seek out and prevent attacks from white nationalist groups.
That decision has come under greater scrutiny after this week’s school shooting in Florida, where a student with suspected ties to white nationalist groups allegedly opened fire on students in an attack that left 17 people dead. On Thursday, suspected school shooter Nikolas Cruz was claimed by a white supremacist group in Florida who said the teenager took part in paramilitary training with them, the New York Times reported.
That has turned focus sharply to Donald Trump and his 2017 decision to slash anti-terrorism funds related to right-wing groups. Trump had frozen grant funding that supported community efforts to stop violent extremism and recruitment efforts, the Hill reported, even as the Department of Homeland Security and other groups noted that white supremacist groups posed more risk than Islamist groups.
“It’s a disgrace that Trump is cutting out Countering Violent Extremism funds for white supremacists and neo-Nazis. We know that the domestic terror threat from them is as great as it from Islamic radicals. It’s a very serious situation,” Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Hill last year.
“I find the pattern of cutting this money to be typical for the Trump administration’s unwillingness to take seriously the threat posed by these people, whether they’re doing it intentionally or not.”
Trump also came under fire last year for a hesitancy to condemn the white supremacists responsible for violence in the Charlottesville, Virginia, protests that left one person dead. Trump had initially declared that there were good people on both sides of the protest and initially bristled at calls for him to specifically call out the white supremacists, though he eventually did so days later.
Donald Trump has already drawn criticism for a tweet on Thursday that appeared to place blame on fellow students for not reporting the student’s violent behavior and warning signs that he could be planning an attack.
But several people did report Nikolas Cruz, including his own parents, who tried to contact police and see if they could help straighten out the teenager. Even some strangers who encountered Cruz raised warning flags. As CNN reported, he shared threatening words on a YouTube video of historical footage of the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas, saying he planned to pull off a shooting like that one day. This alarmed a video blogger who read the comments, prompting him to report them to the FBI.
