The Trump administration has been reallocating scarce federal resources to combating drug cartels (“narco-terrorists”), the Venezuelan state (“a foreign terrorist organization”) and leftist groups like antifa (a “violent fifth column of domestic terrorists”). Aside from obvious concerns about legality, these actions also raise serious questions about the administration’s priorities and distribution of resources.
Drug cartels may be evil, but they are ultimately driven by profit and not by a murderous ideology like the Islamic State is. Antifa is a loose-knit group of activists who may be guilty of scattered acts of violence, but they’re not plotting mass casualty events like al-Qaeda does. The Venezuelan regime is complicit in human rights violations and drug trafficking, but it is not a state sponsor of terrorism like, say, Iran.
While the administration focuses on pseudo-terrorists, it risks losing focus on the battle against actual no-kidding terrorists. Just a week ago, a father-son team of ISIS-inspired terrorists killed 15 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration, shortly after an ISIS fighter in Syria killed two U.S. service members and an American civilian. (On Friday, U.S. forces bombed dozens of sites in Syria in retaliation.)
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