At a Mosque in San Diego, Trump’s Counterterrorism Strategy Falls Flat
During an interview to unveil the latest edition of the U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, Sebastian Gorka, the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, was asked by conservative outlet Breitbart whether the United States faced a terrorism threat from the violent far right. “No,” Gorka responded, and then proceeded to discuss Tucker Carlson and his apparent betrayal of the conservative movement.
Gorka’s answer was likely unsurprising to anyone who read the recent strategy, which fails to mention the far right at all, instead focusing on global Salafi-jihadist threats, narcoterrorism from drug cartels, and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” The final group appeared for the first time in the counterterrorism strategy as part of the Trump administration’s broader shift to crack down on “radical ideologies” that the strategy describes as “antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”
The failure to mention terrorism from the far right, which includes both white supremacists driven by conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement as well as anti-government extremists organizing against perceived federal tyranny, flew in the face of reality. According to data collected by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the far right was by far the deadliest terrorist threat to the United States between 2016 and 2025, claiming over 100 lives in 152 separate attacks, including at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and a Walmart in a predominantly Latino community in El Paso, Texas. There were just 13 fatalities among 35 attacks perpetrated by the far left during that same period.
These days, the national counterterrorism strategy is more symbolic than actionable: After all, the 2026 strategy was released a year late, and it’s fairly obvious its delay did not stop the exercise of counterterrorism across the federal government. But it nevertheless signals what should and should not be prioritized. And given the United States’ long-standing experience with white supremacy and other forms of extremism, including most recently at the Islamic Center of San Diego, the administration’s oversight is likely to cost lives.
Tragedy in San Diego
Terrorism experts widely criticized the document after its release, but the decision to omit far-right threats—which the FBI frequently classifies as racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist (RMVE)—grew even more egregious two weeks after Gorka’s press conference, when two teenagers driven by a range of far-right, white supremacist grievances allegedly attacked a mosque in San Diego, California. At three fatalities, the attack is tied for the deadliest terrorist attack so far in the second Trump administration, and provides another significant data point against the administration’s decision to exclude the violent far right from its strategy.
The San Diego shooters livestreamed their attacks and published individual manifestos, both of which laid out an array of Great Replacement theory-driven grievances. The gunmen styled themselves as the “Sons of Tarrant,” and clearly placed themselves in a lineage that began with Brenton Tarrant’s bloody attack on a Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque in 2019. “The number one goal of this New Crusade is to restart and bring back the momentum that Saint Tarrant had started, to convince many other would be Saints that the time is now, and most importantly to kick start the race war,” the shooters allegedly wrote in a manifesto they published online.
During the attack itself, the gunmen wore fatigues with patches of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, a decentralized network of accelerationists that operated primarily online with the ultimate end of sowing enough chaos and violence to create a “racially pure” white society. Federal prosecutors spent years dismantling the group, including during the first Trump administration. The gunmen also cited another online hate group, Terrorgram, in their manifestos as inspiration for the attack. Terrorgram, which takes its name after the popular and largely unmoderated messaging app Telegram, is another online network of racist and accelerationist extremists that grew from the same online ecosystem as Atomwaffen. Terrogram members have been convicted of plotting terror attacks in the U.S., and the State Department notably designated it as a specially designated global terrorist entity in January 2025.
The San Diego attackers form the latest chain in what scholars Amarnath Amarasingam, Marc-André Argentino, and Graham Macklin call the “cumulative momentum of far-right terror.” Today’s extremists are increasingly online and conscious of past killers’ “success.” The San Diego gunmen will become part of this violent network’s canon, furthering Tarrant’s grisly legacy—as they had hoped. The next generation of accelerationists will scrutinize the gunmen’s writings and invoke the San Diego attack as inspiration for their own acts of terror. Yet the Trump administration’s latest counterterrorism strategy either ignores or overlooks that threats of this nature are growing, as right-wing and other extremists become younger, more desensitized to violence, more online, and more adept at using new means of technology.
The Strategy’s Politicization of Public Safety
The strategy insists that the Biden administration engaged in a willful and widespread “weaponization” of the U.S. intelligence community. It argues, for instance, that the intelligence community’s “confidence can only be won back when counterterrorism is executed uninfected by politics, and if those who used their counterterrorism powers as a weapon against the innocent pay the full judicial cost for their crimes against the civil rights of innocent Americans.” To rebuild this confidence, the administration calls for “a radical shift” in counterterrorism.
The strategy, however, is more “infected by politics” than ever. It praises the Trump administration for bringing “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration” to an end, and accuses “Democrat administrations” of “empower[ing]” “terror-sponsoring regimes like Iran” and the Biden administration of creating a “borderless America.”
More concerningly, the memo continues the administration’s push to turn rhetoric about “violent left-wing extremists” into actual strategy, despite the absence of a clear left-wing threat. It claims “real threats were ignored or underplayed,” namely “the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” In response to these threats, the strategy states that U.S. counterterrorism activities will “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
The memo continues:
We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. We will do the same with the state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on U.S. soil or against Americans anywhere.
The Trump administration already put some of this into action before the strategy’s release. In September 2025, President Trump instructed federal law enforcement to investigate “anti-fascist” groups and designated Antifa as a domestic terrorism organization, though a legal framework for such a domestic designation does not exist. It was also not immediately clear which groups would be implicated by the purported designation, as Antifa doesn’t have a structure or an organized network. The State Department designated four European left-wing groups, which it called “Antifa,” in November 2025 as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), a designation that carries criminal statutory weight under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, the provision for providing material support to an FTO. But the groups are loosely organized and hyperlocal to Europe, with little to no presence in the United States.
To be sure, political violence is on the rise in the United States. The past few years have set new records in the number of federal prosecutions for threats against public officials, only for the next year to surpass it. This includes people motivated by left-wing causes. In December 2025, the FBI arrested five purported members of a group that called itself the “Turtle Island Liberation Front” for an alleged anti-capitalist bombing plot and threats against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. And there were two chaotic shootings at immigration detention centers in Texas in the summer of 2025. In one case, the Justice Department successfully convicted the shooter and seven other defendants of providing material support for terrorism under the theory they were operating as an “Antifa cell.”
But Antifa and other extreme left-wing groups don’t exist in the way the counterterrorism strategy portrays the violent left-wing threat. Even in the Texas case, evidence from trial points to a loosely connected group of individuals, at least several of whom have said they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is simply no left-wing equivalent (or worse) to Atomwaffen or Terrorgram today. Shifting resources and attention to unfounded threats to appease the administration’s partisan ideology will undermine efforts to deter actual threats.
Nihilistic Violent Extremism, a Missed Opportunity
The Trump administration had an opportunity to cultivate bipartisan consensus in its counterterrorism strategy by addressing a rising and legitimate threat that the national security apparatus is actively grappling with: nihilistic violent extremism (NVE). But the 16-page counterterrorism strategy didn’t mention it once.
The FBI began using the nihilistic violent extremism classification in early 2025 to categorize violent actors whose criminal conduct is motivated primarily by “a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” In September 2025, FBI Director Kash Patel testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary that “a large chunk” of the bureau’s 1,700 domestic terrorism investigations targeted nihilistic violent extremists. Two months later, in a post on X, he wrote that the FBI had “seen an almost 500% increase in arrests associated with” nihilistic violent extremism. Patel’s post ended with, “This is among the most important issues in America and we won’t stop working.” Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi similarly called one nihilistic violent extremist group, 764, “the most heinous online child exploitation enterprises we have ever encountered – a network built on terror, abuse, and the deliberate targeting of children.” Members of another horrific network of nihilistic violent extremists, the so-called True Crime Community, were behind a string of murders and school shootings in the past two years.
Patel and Bondi were not wrong. The True Crime Community, 764, and other nihilistic violent extremist groups pose novel, dynamic challenges for U.S. counterterrorism officials. Among the dilemmas that officials have to weigh are how to handle younger (sometimes even juvenile) perpetrators, the consequences of online content moderation backsliding, more attacks against soft targets (such as schools), the blurring between acts of terrorism and nonideological acts of mass violence, and the use of artificial intelligence in terrorism. The counterterrorism strategy could have provided some guidance to officials about how the U.S. should address those looming questions.
Critically, the San Diego gunmen come from the same online ecosystem as 764 and the True Crime Community that glorifies and creates hierarchies based on cruelty. Though the San Diego gunmen operated on the same mainstream messaging applications that NVE-inspired actors use, such as Telegram and Discord, there is a key difference. The gunmen’s RMVE beliefs were rooted in an ideology that calls for a racially pure society. NVE actors, by contrast, are driven by a desire to inflict maximum harm.
In 764, members—who are often underage and victims themselves—gain notoriety and invitations into selective group chats through coercing their victims into escalating acts of physical violence and self-harm. Individuals who pressure their victims into killing themselves are regarded as the highest-ranking members. And in the True Crime Community, killers—including Tarrant, Charleston’s Dylann Roof, and Buffalo’s Payton Gendron—are regarded as “saints.” True Crime Community members have carried out deadly attacks motivated by their aspiration for sainthood status.
Like the resurgence of Atomwaffen through the San Diego attack, years after federal prosecutors had dismantled its network, these threats live on online and need monitoring from counterterrorism experts. Even if prosecutions successfully target 764 and the True Crime Community’s leadership, the online canon will exist to radicalize future members and inspire their attacks. But the Trump administration either appears to believe that nihilistic violent extremism is too insignificant a threat to mention in its counterterrorism strategy, or simply forgot about one of the “most important issues in America,” according to its FBI director. Given that in August 2025 Gorka had criticized the “insane PC verbiage” and “insane acronyms from the Biden administration,” specifically mentioning AGAAVE (anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism) and REMVE and claiming the terms were being “[jettisoned,]” it is unlikely he has made widespread use of the NVE language.
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The final failure of the Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy is more pernicious. At several points, the document appeared to endorse the same far-right talking points that likely drove the attack on the Islamic Center. For instance, the document implored Europe to have “honest conversations about Islamism,” adding that “[u]nfettered mass migration has been the transmission belt for terrorists” and that “[a]s the birthplace of Western culture and values, Europe must act now and halt its willful decline.” (A month later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth commemorated a D-Day remembrance event by invoking Europe’s immigration policies, declaring that “[s]adly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. ... Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”)
Such language creates a permission structure where divisive figures feel more emboldened to share their noxious thoughts, including the same anti-immigration rhetoric that drove the attack. Trump’s close informal adviser Laura Loomer, for instance, declared on X that the San Diego attack was a false flag and seethed, “I’m not going to send my condolences. This is the result of Islamic immigration and we need to get some serious mass deportations of Muslims ASAP.” Gorka similarly reposted an X post from the U.S. Mission to NATO the following morning, which declared, “As a sovereign country you do have the right to control how many people you absorb and how many people you allow in and who those people are. This is a very basic sovereign right.” (Trump, to his credit, told the press it was “a terrible situation” and that “we’re going to be going back and looking at it very strongly.”)
The echoes of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant ideology were present throughout the two manifestos. The younger of the two terrorists, for instance, wrote that “Islam is a religion that inherently creates hate and division between men,” adding that “[t]he culture and laws of Islam do not converge with the white culture and laws.” His partner similarly implored that “[m]ass immigration no matter who or where from is extremely harmful. It only causes a complete cultural and racial replacement, conveniently always being in white countries of course.”
The United States faces a threat landscape that is evolving and unlike anything counterterrorism professionals have dealt with before. The extremists are younger, technology is more sophisticated and accessible, and the targets are increasingly “softer,” selected to maximize the perpetrator’s notoriety. There is no perfect plan for the ill-adjusted teenager radicalized in online chatrooms who embarks on a violent spree with the intention of killing as many as possible like Tarrant, Roof, and Gendron before them. But keeping Americans safe from such threats requires serious, sustained counterterrorism, informed by data and unbothered by politics and ideology. More simply, to even begin to address this new threat environment, the administration has to acknowledge it.
