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Trump's Making it Harder for Cops to Go After White Supremacists

Law enforcement experts worry the President's response to Charlottesville will only embolden far-right groups.

Law enforcement experts worry that the Trump administration's rhetoric and decisions to continue deemphasising the threat of white supremacist attacks—like the one in Charlottesville on Saturday—will further embolden far-right groups and increase the risk of more violence.

While law enforcement agencies across the country continue to investigate reports of far-right extremism, the Trump administration has prioritised other types of extremism—mainly ISIS-inspired—a trend that existed for much of the Obama administration. Only after Dylann Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 did the Obama administration take small steps toward combating far-right violence, experts say.

President Trump's defense of the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville at a press conference Tuesday drew widespread condemnation and seemed to draw a moral equivalence between protesters and white supremacists.

"When you are a white supremacist and you hear the language coming out of the current administration, you sit back and you say, 'Those people believe in what we believe in; they have my back'," said John Cohen, a former analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. "That's what concerns law enforcement the most right now."

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