Trump Admin Terrorist Designations Show Latest Attempt to Target Domestic Enemies

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio added four European anti-fascist groups to the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations last week, he failed to tell the public one thing: how, exactly, these groups threaten Americans.

It’s a critical omission. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary of State can only label a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — a powerful tool that blocks access to the U.S. financial system and makes it a felony to provide support — if three criteria are met.

First, the group must be foreign. That’s straightforward: of the four “violent Antifa” groups Rubio designated, one is German, two are Greek, and the fourth is Italian.

But the other two findings are more complicated. Rubio must show that the groups engage in terrorism and that their activity threatens Americans or American national security interests.

The State Department accused the groups, with some evidence, of planning violent attacks in Europe, including bombings and street fighting. But nothing in the Department’s announcement suggests that any of these groups pose a threat to Americans, particularly given the history of applying this law to groups like Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. There’s no claim of deaths, and, more critically, no claim that any American or American interest was harmed. From the announcement, the groups come off as local extremists, willing to do small-scale acts of violence in their home countries.

There may be classified or otherwise non-public information backing up the decision. But, given that none of that was in the government’s announcement, I put this simple question to the State Department: What threat to U.S. national security interests or U.S. citizens justified these weighty designations?

Spokesman Tommy Pigott told me the following in response:

“The anarchists, Marxists, and violent extremists of Antifa have waged a terror campaign in the United States and across the Western world for decades, carrying out bombings, beatings, shootings, and riots in service of their extreme agenda,” Pigott told TPM. “The State Department is committed to identifying and dismantling these terror networks that conspire to ruthlessly suppress the will of the people and violently topple the very foundations of the United States and Western Civilization.”

If you can manage to wade through the sludge, you’ll still find no claim that these groups have harmed Americans or the country’s national interests. That is, apart from one thing: their supposed link to “Antifa” and other movements of the left. The Trump administration has for years painted “Antifa” as a broad domestic enemy. After Trump-aligned activist Charlie Kirk was killed in September, the administration ramped up the rhetoric.

The group, in Pigott’s telling, poses a threat that’s both ideological and violent, harboring a desire to “suppress the will of the people and violently topple” the foundations of the U.S. and the West.

For the administration, the designations fill a gap.

Seeking Antifa

In late September, Trump issued two executive actions. One supposedly designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Legal experts dismissed this order as a “nullity” given that there’s no law under which a group, real or not, could become a domestic terrorist organization. The other, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, sparked more concern among civil liberties advocates because of what it directed law enforcement to do: scrutinize groups that support “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” claiming they are potential sources of political violence.

NSPM-7 didn’t create a new law that would allow for investigations of Americans as members of “Antifa” — a catch-all term that encompasses broad swathes of people who describe themselves as opposed to fascism — over potential terrorism violations. Still, Federal prosecutors charged a group of people who staged a July attack on an ICE facility in Texas for allegedly belonging to a criminal enterprise that, in a second indictment filed months after the attack, they dubbed an “Antifa cell.”

Now, the administration seems to be attempting to add a new tool to its “Antifa” targeting toolbox. By designating foreign groups, the government is opening the door to using counterterrorism authorities to investigate whether Americans are providing “material support” to what Pigott described as a vast, violent conspiracy spanning Europe and the United States. (For emphasis: there’s nothing to suggest that this is based in reality; in Europe and the U.S., “Antifa” is a broad description for a scattered, disorganized set of groups and a protest style.)

Jason Blazakis, a former director of the Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, called the move “problematic.”

He warned that the designations could allow for more aggressive tactics by law enforcement, including efforts to infiltrate domestic groups while probing for supposed links to foreign entities.

“It comes down to how you might be criminalizing ideology,” Blazakis told TPM. “It’s that chilling effect that this is going to have as part of a process to try to diminish legitimate political opposition.”

It could form another line of attack against a progressive non-profit sector that is, to some extent, already chilled, several executives recently told TPM, as it prepares to weather federal investigations.

Weimar Redux

The idea of designating Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization first surfaced in public in October, at the administration’s “Antifa roundtable.” That event brought senior administration officials together with right-wing activist-influencers like Andy Ngo and Jack Posobiec. The two have spent years casting violent extremists on the left as part of an organized national conspiracy that is capable of undermining the foundation of American government.

At the roundtable, both urged Trump to designate Antifa as a foreign terrorist group; to Posobiec, Trump said yes.

“Let’s get it done, Marco,” Trump told Rubio at the meeting. “We’ll take care of it.”

Cabinet officials, like Rubio, have since sought to demonstrate their anti-Antifa bona fides to Trump and the MAGA base. Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that his Department was making lists of nonprofits, likening the death of Charlie Kirk to a “domestic 9/11.”

Posobiec celebrated the designations on his podcast last week as a continuation of a fight that started in Weimar, Germany.

“Antifa was formed in Germany in the Weimar Republic originally, and it’s always been the home base of Antifa,” he said, recalling something he told Trump at the meeting. “And so, now we see direct action taken from the Trump administration on this.”

Posobiec exaggerated the move, saying that the administration had designated Antifa itself as a foreign terrorist group.

What Rubio did last week falls short of that. Of the four groups designated, only one — Germany’s Antifa Ost — has an explicit connection to the movement. Even they go by “hammerbande,” a reference to the weapons they’ve used in assaults on people they call neo-Nazis. Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary deemed it a terrorist organization in September.

New powers

Vagueness about what Antifa is and how far the government will go in pursuing it helps the Trump administration use one of its go-to tools: intimidation.

The four groups that Rubio designated are marginal actors who, per the evidence State provided, have neither planned nor executed anything approaching the kind of large-scale, 9/11-esque attacks that gave rise to the system for designating groups as foreign terrorist organizations.

But their presence on the list suggests that the government is already searching for Antifa movements and their ties to the U.S., Blazakis said. Private firms like banks and social media companies that traditionally pay attention to foreign terrorist designations are also on notice, he added.

“It’s potentially quite dangerous because anti-fascism is a way of thinking and an ideology,” Blazakis said.

One person who has felt the brunt of this is Mark Bray, a professor at Rutgers who wrote a book called “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

After Kirk’s death, Turning Point USA’s Rutgers chapter called him a “prominent leader of the Antifa movement on campus.” Bray received escalating death threats, and decided it was time for his family to leave for its safety. He fled to Spain in October.

Even abroad, he’s still in the far-right’s crosshairs. Posobiec called for Bray to be prosecuted under the Antifa designations during his podcast last week.

“You know what I’d love to see? I want to really see that Spanish Antifa group designated, because it’s really interesting to me that Dr. Antifa fled directly to Spain,” Posobiec mused. “Remember when he left Rutgers? He fled directly to Spain and immediately started working with Spanish Antifa. Almost like, almost like he was providing material support to a terrorist organization. Perish the thought.”

Bray told TPM that he wasn’t surprised to see what Posobiec had said, but doubted that either Posobiec or the State Department understood basic questions about the movement. He called the designations “lazy,” telling TPM of both: “I have a very low estimation of their knowledge on the subject, based on what they’ve said and written.”

He argued that the point wasn’t so much about European Antifa groups or Antifa in the U.S., but about intimidating opposition in the U.S.

“I don’t even think they really care about actual Antifa groups in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s a boogeyman, and a guilt-by-association kind of framework for a kind of boogeyman repression.”