Trump Advisers: He Was ‘Triggered’ by Talk of White Supremacy
Two former top Homeland Security officials in the Trump administration have told The Daily Beast that there was an unwritten policy to not utter phrases like “domestic terrorism” and “white supremacy” around the president, for fear that he would take such conversations as implicit criticism of him.
The directives, said Elizabeth Neumann, previously assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security for counterterrorism and threat prevention, were never formalized. But both she and Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at DHS, say that they were explicitly told by White House brass not to use such phrases or terms around Trump.
“Following the El Paso mass-shooting last year, the White House was looking to find a way to show that they were handling the situation,” Neumann, who worked on countering extremism and domestic terror, recalled. “I was advised by senior officials in the White House at the time that I should couch this in terms of countering violence, rather than countering domestic terrorism or white supremacy, when discussing it at the White House or in front of the president… The subtext was clear, that by using those words, we would be distracting the president from the core issue.”