The Trump administration faced fresh scrutiny on Sunday over the president’s fraught record on white nationalism in the wake of a suspected hate crime at a synagogue in California on Saturday, which left one woman dead and three injured.
Trump unequivocally condemned the shooting, telling a rally on Saturday evening in Wisconsin: “Our entire nation mourns the loss of life, prays for the wounded, and stands in solidarity with the Jewish community. We forcefully condemn the evil of anti-Semitism and hate, which must be defeated.”
But the president stated last month, following a hate-inspired mass shooting that left 50 Muslim worshipers dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, that he did not believe white nationalism presented a growing threat.
“I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess,” Trump told reporters in March.
Confronted with Trump’s words from last month, the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway sought to amend the record during an interview with CNN on Sunday.
“He does think it’s a threat. There is no question it’s a threat,” Conway said. “It is a threat … it’s horrible wherever it is. It should be driven out.”
The administration has already been warned by security agencies of the growing dangers of white supremacy in the US. In May 2017 the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] authored a joint bulletin declaring that white nationalists had been responsible for more attacks than any other domestic extremist group in the US over the past 16 years and “likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.”
The shooter in Saturday’s attack in Poway, near San Diego, was named as a white 19 year-old man, John Earnest. Authorities were examining a series of online posts linked to the suspect that are littered with anti-Semitic and racist language.
Trump’s record on white supremacy is being targeted by the growing number of contenders for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. Three days ago, former vice president Joe Biden launched his campaign for the White House with a video from Charlottesville, Virginia, where in 2017 a white supremacist rally over confederate monuments descended into widespread violence and lead to the murder of 32 year-old anti-extremism protester Heather Heyer.
In a now infamous press conference following the Charlottesville violence, Trump declared there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protests.
Following Biden’s announcement last week, in which he homed in on Trump’s 2017 remarks, the president also sought to amend the record.
When asked by reporters on Friday if he stood by the comments, Trump responded: “I’ve answered that question and if you look at what I said you will see that that question was answered perfectly, and I was talking about people that went [to the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally] because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great [Confederate] general.”
On Sunday, Conway claimed Trump’s 2017 remarks had been taken out of context. “I think it was twisted for many years,” Conway told CNN.
Asked if she agreed with the president’s assessment that the comments were “answered perfectly”, Conway characterized them as “darned near perfection”.
The attack in Poway, on the last day of the Jewish celebration of Passover, came less than a week after the terrorist attack by Isis on Christian churches in Sri Lanka. The alleged shooter is also being investigated in connection to an arson attack on a mosque near San Diego last month.
Adam Hertzman, spokesman for the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, a city where 11 Jewish worshippers were murdered in another mass shooting at the hands of an alleged white nationalist six months ago, told CNN on Sunday: “The level of anti-semitism in the US has been increasing, as has hate against many groups.”
In Poway, California, friends of victims of the shooting who were at the synagogue when the attack happened on Saturday, spoke out against hate.
Oren Lee, a congregant, told the Guardian what he thought about extremists like the gunman: “People get depressed and they start not knowing what to live for…so they start feeding into some ideology that picks them up.”
He added: “Unfortunately, it tends to be a very hateful one, no matter what side of the aisle the person might be on. It’s a hateful thing that they start picking up. And then that’s what tears the person up — they don’t have something that they’re actually living for. That’s why they did this. Just a meaningless thing.”
Marie Craig, the best friend of Lori Kaye, the woman killed, said of her: “She would not want anger. There is anger, and there is a right to be angry. But at the end of the day Lori is not an angry person. I mean, it’s not that she is naive — she’d say ‘this is a horrible attack, this is terrible, I can’t believe this happened.’ But she’d want something good to come out of it.”