New Counterterrorism Strategy Omits One Major Threat: The One From The Far Right (Part One)

By Luke Baumgartner
On May 6, 2026, the White House unveiled its official 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy, a long-awaited document whose release had been delayed several times by the Trump administration’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka. The 16-page treatise identifies threats from three major terror groups: narcoterrorists and transnational gangs; legacy Islamist terrorists; and violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.
Notably absent from the list, and the entire document, though, is any mention of far-right extremists.
The decision by administration officials to omit references to the persistent threat of far-right extremism reflects a marked departure from the Biden administration. In June 2021, it published the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” which assessed that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs) present the most lethal DVE threats, with RMVEs most likely to conduct mass–casualty attacks against civilians.” Despite this focus, my Program on Extremism colleague, Jon Lewis, aptly described the Biden administration’s own response to right-wing extremism, outside of the January 6 prosecutions, as largely “anemic” by highlighting the 22-year prison sentence given to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio for seditious conspiracy. The punishments for Tarrio and more than 1,500 others have since been pardoned, commuted, or dropped after a deluge of executive order...