Taylor said the White House wasn’t initially all that interested in DHS’s efforts to turn the old office into a new one focused on terrorism and targeted violence.
“We were pushing the White House: ‘Make this a priority, talk about this, fight for money on Capitol Hill for this,’” he said. “It was on deaf ears. You could not have seen a White House less interested in this.”
Neumann said she wished DHS and the White House had both moved faster. There were National Security Council staff who wanted to strengthen the administration’s response to the growing threat, she said. But the dizzying cycle of leadership changes in the upper echelons of Trump’s national security team didn’t make it easy.
“There was no NSC structure that was systematically working on issues like that,” she said. “It’s not to say that they weren’t doing things; it’s just that when you have chaos all around you, it’s really hard to do process stuff.”
On Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He told investigators that he liked the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, according to The Wall Street Journal, and posted a manifesto of his own saying he wanted to kill as many Hispanics as he could.
On Aug. 4, a gunman killed nine people at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Earlier this month, per CNN, the FBI said its investigation into the killer’s motives is ongoing.
After the weekend of massacres, White House officials became more interested in Neumann’s project. Officials told her they could point to her work to show they took the problem seriously. She briefed multiple officials on domestic terrorism issues and what the government could do to prevent attacks. One challenge was particularly thorny, however: The officials, who Neumann declined to name, didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism.”
“They very clearly were looking at it through the lens of, ‘We have a violence problem,’” Neumann recalled. “And they did not want to talk about the ideological threat.”
