Campaign Action
While the Trump administration is whipping up fear about immigrants using misleading international terrorism statistics, they’re ignoring killings by the white supremacists Donald Trump considers to be “very fine people”:
According to the latest data from Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, white supremacists were responsible for more than half of the 34 fatalities linked to domestic extremists of all stripes last year, claiming 18 lives in 2017.
That represented a reversion to the long-term trend; right-wing violence had accounted for the largest share of domestic-extremist related killings every year from 1995 until the Pulse nightclub shootings in 2016. Global totals may tell a very different story, but in the United States far-right extremist murders far exceed those carried out by Islamic extremists over the last decade: 71 percent of all murders were carried out by right-wing extremists, and 26 percent can be linked to Islamic extremists.
But Trump doesn’t care about violence by white supremacists. As we saw after neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville last summer, he’ll condemn their violence in generic terms when pressed to read a script, but when he speaks his own mind it’s clear that he’s on their side. And making it a priority to fight white supremacist violence would alienate Trump’s base when he’d much rather win their love and loyalty by attacking black and brown immigrants.