National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was removed this week but a key Trump counterterrorism official remains in place at the White House — and he's planning a change in strategy to focus on jihadists rather than white supremacist groups that one leading expert said remain a significant domestic threat.
"The call is coming from inside the house," said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. "We all understand why the right doesn't want to tackle domestic violent extremism — it's their base."
The Trump official is Sebastian Gorka, an Anglo-Hungarian-American academic who spent seven months in the first Trump White House as a national security strategist before being removed. Closely connected to Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Gorka's far-right views have proved consistently controversial. His return to the White House generated protests from former Trump advisers, who called him names including “conman” and “clown.”
Regardless, Gorka is promising a new policy focused on “killing jihadis,” thereby downplaying, if not altogether abandoning, a Biden-era emphasis on white supremacist threats.
Now deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism in the National Security Council, Gorka is by his own estimation an expert on “Middle Eastern jihadism, al-Qaida [and] ISIS.” His X biography includes the acronym “WWFY&WWKY,” which stands for “we will find you and we will kill you.”
This week, Gorka wrote for Breitbart News that Trump has “already engineered a complete reversal in American counterterrorism policy.”
Gorka recounted a meeting with Trump and Waltz during the second week of the new administration. Gorka and Waltz laid a map on the Resolute Desk, showing a cave complex in northern Somalia that was being used as a base by ISIS, Gorka said.
“Kill them, and kill them now,” Trump said, according to Gorka. Thirty hours later, he said, the men were in the Situation Room “watching living hell rain down” on the caves.
Speaking last week at Semafor’s World Economy Summit, Gorka said the new counterterrorism plan, expected to be ready in the coming month, will be “utterly, completely” different from the strategy under Joe Biden. Gorka said the new plan will “go back to the basics,” as “the majority of threats we face are jihadi terrorists.”
In his preface to the 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, Biden highlighted white supremacist attacks: the 2015 massacre of Black worshipers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that was targeted for supporting immigrants, and the 2019 slaughter of Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex. by a gunman who echoed the Trump epithet “invaders.”
Though it cited an array of violent ideologies, the national strategy asserted that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (principally those who promote the superiority of the white race) and militia violent extremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.”
Like other officials in the Trump administration, Gorka has said little if anything publicly about the threat posed by violent neo-Nazi accelerationists, who seek to bring about the collapse of society through mass shootings and industrial sabotage.
But Gorka has in the past downplayed white supremacy. In 2017, as an adviser in the first Trump White House, he told Breitbart, where he was previously a national security editor, that where terrorism was concerned, white supremacy was not a problem. Three days later in Charlottesville, Va. a man who had rallied with the white supremacist group Vanguard America drove a car into a group of peaceful anti-racist protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the attack “domestic terrorism.”
Gorka could not be reached for comment for this story. Lewis, from George Washington University, worried that a national strategy on terrorism that erases references to racial motivation might discourage FBI agents from seeking authorization to investigate white supremacist plots.
“In the face of overwhelming statistical evidence, there is a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the reality, because it would fly in the face of their narrative,” Lewis told Raw Story. “It’s not going to go away. We can put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. There’s still going to be mass shootings, even if we don’t acknowledge that they’re motivated by white supremacy, and the FBI just calls them ‘sad white boys.’
“If anything, the complete inability of the administration to even acknowledge the problem will afford these individuals a more permissive environment to recruit, radicalize and carry out attacks.”
In his recent article for Breitbart, Gorka charged that the Biden administration “ignored the growing threat of global jihadism.”
Under the Biden administration, the FBI arrested an Afghan national who allegedly planned a mass casualty attack on Election Day in the name of ISIS. In total, Lewis said, 10 ISIS supporters were arrested in the U.S. in 2024.
On New Year's Eve, a man inspired by ISIS used his truck to attack revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. Before that, Lewis said, the last lethal jihadi attack on U.S. soil occurred in 2019, when a Saudi airman taking courses at Naval Air Station Pensacola murdered three U.S. sailors.
Since then, avowed white supremacists have carried out mass shootings targeting African Americans in Buffalo, N.Y., resulting in 10 deaths, and Jacksonville, Fla., with three deaths.
In terms of disrupted plots, a review by Raw Story found that since 2021, the FBI has disrupted at least three attempts to attack the power grid by white supremacists affiliated with the Terrorgram Collective, a group recently designated by the State Department as a global terrorist entity. In the same period, the FBI disrupted at least six plots by white supremacists to carry out lethal attacks against police officers and LGBTQ+ people.
Gorka has also promised changes in emphasis on resources used to counter terror groups. For Breitbart, he wrote that the centerpiece of Trump’s counterterrorism approach will be “allowing our special operators, the intelligence community, and the bravest warfighters in the world to deal death to those who have the blood of Americans on their hands or who are plotting to murder our citizens.”
ProPublica, however, has reported that the new administration has cut nearly 20 percent of the workforce at a Department of Homeland Security center responsible for “strengthen[ing] the nation’s ability to prevent targeted violence and terrorism nationwide, through funding, training, evidence-based resources and increasing public awareness across every level of government, the private sector, and local communities.”
