Ben Shapiro Warns Trump Won’t Find An Easy Fix For ‘Massive Problem’ With Islamic Radicalization

Ben Shapiro warned the shooting of two National Guard troops last week made it clear President Donald Trump is facing a “significantly harder” problem to solve — radicalized Muslims who turn violent after entering the U.S.— that cannot be answered by merely halting immigration requests from Afghanistan and reexamining green card holders.

The Daily Wire cofounder, on the latest episode of The Ben Shapiro Show on Monday, pointed to comments made by Kristi Noem over the weekend. The Homeland Security Secretary, during an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, said the suspected shooter, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was “radicalized since he’s been here” by connections to the Muslim community in Washington, where he had been living since 2021.

That makes it a tougher issue for Trump to fix, Shapiro said.

“Radicalization in the United States is a massive problem, and, by the way, requires the FBI and the DoJ to actually do the thing they are supposed to do — track down the groups doing the radicalizing,” Shapiro said.

He continued, “[That is a] significantly harder problem to solve — really, a much harder law enforcement problem to solve — than just shutting the borders, which is what President Trump is attempting to do.”

Shapiro said the two are not “mutually exclusive” — Trump can and should restrict who is allowed into the U.S., he said. But if Noem is correct, Shapiro said the shooting in Washington, D.C. last week fits a “different pattern” than violence committed by illegal immigrants.

“[What] you’d really be talking about is an Islamization problem, a radical Islamization problem, inside the United States,” he said.

He pointed to a number of attacks where radicalized Muslims were the culprits, including the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, which killed 13 people, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando where 49 people were murdered, and the New Orleans attack earlier this year, where 14 people were fatally run over. The D.C. shooting, Shapiro said, would fall into the same sickening category.

Shapiro said the thought of Lakanwal becoming radicalized once he came to the U.S. was especially concerning, since, as The Free Press reported, Lakanwal had been subjected to “extensive vetting” before joining one of the CIA’s “Zero Units.”

Lakanwal is the suspected shooter who killed Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old National Guard member, in the heinous attack on November 27. The other troop member who was shot, 24-year-old Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, continues to fight for his life in the hospital.

He entered the U.S. as part of then-President Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome, which resettled Afghans in the States, after the U.S. withdrew from the country in 2021. His application for asylum was approved in April by the Trump administration.

Trump, on the night of the shooting, vowed the “animal” who shot the two troops will “pay a very steep price.” His administration then halted “all immigration requests” from Afghanistan.

He also ordered a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination” of green card holders from 19 “countries of concern” on Thursday, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, and Venezuela.

Shapiro also said, on the claim that Lakanwal was radicalized after arriving in America:

That is a much worse problem than just bringing people in from cultures that are non-communicative and non-coalescing with Western Civilization. That you can stop, right? That you can do what President Trump is saying, just stop immigration from third world countries, as he says.

But if in fact there are people who are being brought in who are initially somewhat friendly to the United States or who have worked with the United States, and then are being radicalized in the United States, you have to start asking some pretty serious questions about which organization in the United States — here, like at home — are actually radicalizing people.

Watch Shapiro above.