In this sense, Islamist militant terrorism is an easier enemy. Shades of that ideology exist nowhere on the mainstream American political spectrum, but some of the central tenets pushed by white-nationalist terrorists are extreme iterations of ideas on the American right. President Donald Trump has never called for violence. But he has hinted and winked at it. He has demonized immigrants and Muslims since the early days of his presidential campaign. And he has used dehumanizing language when talking about people of color—a predominantly black congressional district is “disgusting, rodent and rat infested”; predominantly black countries are “shitholes.” He has referred to illegal immigration by Hispanics as an “invasion.”

Because the language of white-nationalist terrorism can echo the language of Trump and his allies, it raises difficult questions about how to enable U.S. authorities to better address the problem.

Read: A reformed white nationalist says the worst is yet to come

At the moment, there is a significant disparity in the amount of funds, personnel, and law-enforcement tools that America devotes to combatting Islamist versus white-nationalist terrorism. Finding a way to add white nationalists to the list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations could help address that, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me. It would lower the bar for law enforcement to be able to charge a person for providing material support to white-nationalist terrorists. It would allow investigators to get warrants to monitor their international communications. The Treasury Department could look into their finances and perhaps issue sanctions. U.S. investigators would have more leeway to explore whether individual attacks and plots were part of a larger network. (Alternatively, as the former FBI agent Ali Soufan has proposed, laws surrounding domestic terrorism could be changed to provide authorities with similar powers.)

But all of this is unlikely to happen in America’s political climate. “I think you’re going to have a question on the right about whether this is an end-around to targeting political beliefs. And on the left you’re going to have the same organizations that have been concerned about privacy and civil rights [surrounding U.S. efforts to target Islamist extremism] being concerned about this, regardless of the ideology,” Hughes told me. “It’s one of those things that sounds good as a talking point, but when you start to get into the weeds of it—are you going to designate a local Klan chapter, and how does that address the First Amendment?—I don’t think we’ve had that conversation yet.”

Instead, he proposed some more realistic measures. In the wake of the Charleston shooting in 2016, the Obama administration created a domestic-terrorism council within the U.S. Department of Justice, but it needs more staff and resources. The mandate of the National Counterterrorism Center could be reinterpreted to include a broader reading of terrorism that would allow it to focus on better analyzing and understanding the threat from white-nationalist extremism. “There are FBI agents who focus on the issue,” Hughest said, “but they don’t have the staff or resources international terrorism has.”