On September 22, 2025, Trump signed an order designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” and directing agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” its operations, including “against those who fund such operations.” The order was published in the Federal Register on September 25, the same day Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum, NSPM-7, on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The Associated Press reported that whether he can actually make such a designation “remained unclear”: the U.S. has a list of foreign terrorist organizations but no domestic equivalent, and no single domestic terrorism statute exists.
The designation raised immediate legal and civil liberties concerns because antifa is not a structured organization. Fox News described it as “a decentralized movement that does not have a designated leader, membership or structure.” Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center for Justice told NPR, “There is no framework to designate an organization as a domestic terrorist organization.” Writing in Lawfare, Thomas Brzozowski called the designation “as a matter of positive law, almost certainly a nullity,” while warning that banks, payment processors and platforms may act as though it were binding.
NSPM-7 went further. It named “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the “common threads animating this violent conduct,” language broad enough to reach a wide range of lawful political views. It directed investigators toward “institutional and individual funders” of groups it links to political violence and told the Treasury to “identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence,” directives the Brennan Center warned could be used against nonprofits and grant-makers that oppose the administration.
A Brennan Center report by Patel said the memo's list of violent incidents “is obviously cherry-picked to highlight what the administration believes to be 'left-wing' violence,” leaving out the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the 2022 racist mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store and the 2025 shootings of two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers. CNN, noting several violent attacks by individuals opposing the administration, reported in May 2026: “Organized terrorism from left-wing groups, however, is far more rare.”
In May 2026, the administration's counterterrorism plan formally placed left-wing networks like Antifa among the “three major types of terror groups” the U.S. faces, alongside cartels and Islamist groups.
Correction (October 14, 2026): This entry previously said Trump signed “executive orders”; he signed one order on September 22, 2025, and NSPM-7, a presidential memorandum, followed on September 25. It put quotation marks around a statement that the designation “cherry-picked left-wing violence and excluded other high-profile examples including January 6”; that is a paraphrase, and the Brennan Center's actual words, about NSPM-7's list of incidents, are now quoted. It quoted the order as targeting organizations funding “radical, politically motivated groups”; that phrase does not appear in the order or the memorandum, which refer to “those who fund such operations” and to “institutional and individual funders.” It said right-wing extremist violence “has been documented as a far greater domestic terrorism threat”; that comparison was not supported by the cited sources and has been replaced with what CNN and the Brennan Center report. It said the designation was the first of its kind; no cited source says so, and the title now states the narrower, sourced point that U.S. law has no domestic counterpart to the list of foreign terrorist organizations. It said only one federal terrorism case had been brought against left-wing groups before May 7, 2026; CNN reported that the July case in Texas was the first such case, not the only one. A keyFact attributing this analysis to Keep Our Republic and a May 5 New York Times column has been removed because no source for those attributions was cited.