On May 6, 2026, the Trump White House released a national counterterrorism strategy drafted under White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, with a signed foreword by Trump. It is the first counterterrorism strategy of Trump's second term. It lists three “major types of terror groups”: “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” It commits the government to “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
The document does not mention far-right violence. ProPublica reported that “The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn't merit a mention,” and that analysts said militant leftists are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida. Terrorism analyst Colin Clarke called the document “highly partisan & mostly incoherent.”
The strategy says Americans “have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” That characterization is contested: ProPublica reported that “Terrorism analysts say the attack motives do not appear so clear-cut,” and the suspect has yet to go to trial.
On methods, the strategy says the government will “use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.” The administration formally designated antifa as a terror group in September 2025. On a call with reporters, Gorka said, “We see a threat, we will respond to it, and we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”
The strategy replaces a 2021 strategy under President Joe Biden that ProPublica described as “centered on mostly far-right domestic threats.” Gorka called his document a “return to common sense.” Mother Jones reported that the 2021 Biden-era document “has now been scrubbed from the White House website.” Researchers told ProPublica the strategy's threat terms are ill-defined and are not used in international counterterrorism work. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of American University's Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, told ProPublica, “What it tells me is that this administration is not paying attention to the data, to what our allies are seeing globally, or to where the biggest threats of violence come from or how they might be prevented.” Mother Jones headlined its coverage “'Counterterrorism' Now Officially Means Targeting Trans People.”
Update (October 2, 2026): A second tracker entry on the same strategy has been merged into this one, with its sources.
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry previously dated the strategy to mid-May 2026; it was released May 6, and the date field has been corrected from May 14 (the date of Techdirt's coverage). It called the Kirk passage a false factual claim; the suspect's motives are contested and he has not been tried, so the entry now says so. It said the strategy places the three threat categories “at the same tier” and equates them with al-Qaeda; the document lists them as three major threat types, and the al-Qaida comparison is analysts' characterization reported by ProPublica. We removed unsourced figures (a 5,000-citizen watchlist, a 300% rise in investigations, $166 million for an NSPM-7 center) and a claim that the strategy is a binding document authorizing resource allocation.