Nate Snyder, a former senior D.H.S. counterterrorism official who served on the C.V.E. task force, described a pattern of neglect under Trump. “There’s a whole sort of rash of things stemming from the transition period between administrations to where there were deliberate decisions made to really not only hamstring the countering violent extremism efforts but to systematically de-fang it,” he told me. “It’s there in symbolic form right now for the most part, and there’s some good people who are there still struggling to keep the lights on.” But as Snyder noted, the vacancy left by former Office of Community Partnerships director George Selim has yet to be filled. “The administration’s M.O. is more focused on destroying, systematically, by a thousand paper cuts.”

The C.V.E. was hardly a shining success within the Obama administration. It was still in its infancy at the end of Obama’s second term, and critics accused it of stigmatizing American Muslim communities. Perhaps more important, insiders noted that there are several other government agencies focused on violent extremism. According to an F.B.I. spokesperson, the bureau is currently investigating around 1,000 cases of domestic terrorism. At its core, however, C.V.E. represented an effort to prevent radicalization through engagement with community-based programs, as opposed to simply hunting down extremists after they committed crimes—an approach the Trump administration has effectively given up. “When I talk to my friends in the national security division of the Department of Justice or even at D.H.S. or at U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, they are seeing an uptick in far-right extremism and they are going after it,” a second former D.H.S. official told me. “It is not like they are not. I think the difference is, there is no extra effort being put forth to building a prevention space.”

De-radicalization is arguably a more pressing issue than ever. Over the past decade there has been a spike in right-wing extremist activity and in 2016, hate crimes reached their highest mark since 2012. “Over the course of the past several years, there’s been a normalization, if you will, of hate speech or extremism both online and offline,” Selim, who is now the senior vice president of programs at the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “The combination of the an uptick of extremist and anti-Semitic rhetoric that has now been mainstreamed, with the mainstreaming of hate and extremism as part of our political discourse, coupled with some the technical capability social media savvy, allows for these haters and bigots to better connect and organize online. This recipe has created this very combustible mix across America.”

Complicating matters, officials say, is Trump’s hate-fueled commentary about migrants, Muslims, and George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor loathed by anti-Semites. “You are adding fuel to the fire,” the second former official said. “We are at a turning point where a lot of the fringe groups think that their views are becoming mainstream, so we see these types of manifestations like you did last week.” Heidi Beirich, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, was even more blunt. “You have hate emanating from the highest official in the land,” she told me. “It’s one thing when you have white supremacists saying these terrible things on their own to each other, or even trying to propagandize, and it’s a far different situation when they have the sanction of the highest office and, frankly, other folks in the G.O.P. who are parroting those ideas.”

The violent fringe of right-wing politics is indeed creeping into the mainstream. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year was billed by its organizers as a “coming out” of sorts for proud white nationalists. Republican Congressman Steve King, who has espoused racist talking points in the past, has grown increasingly vocal in his view that nonwhite immigrants are destroying Western culture. Nor is he the only politician echoing language that was once carefully filtered through rhetorical dog-whistles. In the 2018 election cycle, the Anti-Defamation League identified more than a dozen candidates for political office with “problematic views” ranging from white nationalist sympathies to outright anti-Semitism.