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TRUMP’S BLUEPRINT TO CRUSH THE LEFT DRAWS FROM DECADES OF
COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY  
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Chip Gibbons
October 3, 2025
Drop Site News
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_ Trump's NSPM-7 is a pivotal policy endangering free expression in
the United States. _

Federal officers deployed CS gas, flash grenades and less-lethal
rounds outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building
in Portland on June 14, 2025, (Mark Graves/The Oregonian).

 

Five days after the murder of conservative political activist Charlie
Kirk, Vice President JD Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White
House. The Trump administration has never been particularly friendly
to dissent, but since the killing of Kirk it has increasingly sought
to lay blame for his death on their political opponents.

While broadcasting from the White House, the vice president used the
opportunity to rail against the left, promising
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to “dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism
in our own country.” Vance was joined by Stephen Miller who serves
as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff as well as Trump’s Homeland
Security Advisor. Miller pledged, “With God as my witness, we are
going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice,
Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt,
eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the
American people.” Later, Miller obliquely referenced
[[link removed]] the First
Amendment on X, saying “The path forward is…to take all necessary
and rational steps to save civilization” not to “mimic the ACLU of
the mid 90s.“

It was in this atmosphere that the Trump White House issued two
pivotal policies for the future of free expression in the United
States. On the evening of September 22, Trump signed
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an executive order designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist
organization.” Antifa is short for “anti-fascist.” It refers to
an ideology. Although there may be groups that would classify their
beliefs as “anti-fascist,” there is no singular or central
“Antifa” organization. Nevertheless, on some parts of the right,
the mythical Antifa has started to play the role of boogeyman formerly
reserved for the Communist Party. Whereas Communists were argued to be
the hidden driving force behind everything from Civil Rights to peace
activism, the nonexistent Antifa is now fingered as the secret,
sinister mover of domestic protest—and the legally dubious move of
declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization has become a major
rallying point on the right.

To carry out the renewed war on left-wing protest, Trump has not
needed to pass new laws nor create new agencies.

Under U.S. law, there is no statutory framework for designating
_domestic _groups as terrorist organizations. Congress has empowered
the Secretary of State to designate Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
The executive branch has also used the International Emergency Powers
Act to sanction Specially Designated Global Terrorists. While this
designation has been applied to U.S. groups
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even U.S. citizens
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to be designated the U.S. government must allege they acted on behalf
of or provided services to foreign terrorists. Because the U.S.
considers activity that in any other context would be First
Amendment–protected speech to be “coordinated advocacy,” these
designations have sweeping ramifications for domestic political
speech.

These designations have no domestic counterpart, but the FBI under its
current guidelines _is_ empowered to conduct “enterprise”
investigations into terrorism or racketeering. While there may be no
designation for domestic terrorist organizations, the FBI does
investigate domestic groups as “terrorist enterprises.” And as
recently as 2019, the FBI was demarcating its domestic terrorism
investigations by ideology, such as “anarchist extremism, “black
separatist extremism,” “Puerto Rican Independence Extremism,”
“militia extremism,” and “white supremacy extremism.” This
included a case classification
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terrorist enterprise investigations into anarchist extremists. Former
FBI Director Christopher Wray previously told
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had opened anarchist extremist investigations into individuals
inspired by Antifa beliefs. likely gave the FBI the greenlight to
pursue them.

If there was any question as to whether his Executive Order was merely
bluster, Trump clarified the matter three days later when he issued
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National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Bearing
Trump’s signature, NSPM-7 was clearly drafted with a deep
understanding of the U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy. It seeks to
“disrupt” not just those allegedly carrying out left-wing
violence, but those who fund it and those who “radicalize” and
recruit individuals to partake in it. It declares domestic terrorism
to be a top priority and defines domestic terrorism priorities to
include “civil unrest” and “doxing.”

The memo lays out a range of responsibilities for government agencies.
It tasks the Secretary of Treasury to apply powers traditionally used
against money laundering and international terrorism to ferreting out
the funders of so-called domestic terrorism. It instructs the IRS to
make sure no “tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly
financing political violence or domestic terrorism,” and refer those
that are to the Department of Justice for prosecution. It instructs
the Attorney General to come up with a list of “recurrent motives”
and indicators of groups that engage in supposed domestic terrorism so
that resources can be directed at similar groups to “prevent
potential violent activity.”

At the heart of the strategy lies the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task
Force (JTTF). The first JTTF was created in 1980 to bring the FBI and
the New York Police Department together in response
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to politically motivated robberies by radical groups
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that time, the model has spread across the country. Currently, there
are 200 FBI JTTFs around the country. By comparison, the FBI has 55
field offices. While the JTTFs are FBI entities, carrying out FBI
investigations, their staff are drawn from other federal and local law
enforcement agencies. According to the FBI, as of October 2024 the
JTTFs consisted
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of “4,000 members—including FBI personnel and task force officers
(or TFOs) from more than 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal
agencies.” Deputizing local police to carry out FBI terrorism
investigations dramatically increased the FBI’s manpower, making
sprawling investigations such as a nationwide pursuit of a nebulous
idea, possible. It also creates a pool of agents and officers ordered
to go out and find terrorists, facing pressure to open investigations
in line with the FBI’s political priorities.

Whether it be regular FBI agents or Task Force Officers, those
carrying out the FBI counterterrorism mission are instructed to be
proactive in finding terrorists before they strike. After the attacks
on September 11, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director
Robert Mueller retooled the FBI’s focus away from a law enforcement
agency that prosecuted terrorists after they acted to an intelligence
agency dedicated to preventing and disrupting terrorists before they
can strike. To do this, Ashcroft and his successor Michael Mukasey
dramatically rewrote the guidelines under which the FBI operated.
These guidelines were originally put in place after revelations of the
abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover years, when the FBI spied on antiwar and
civil rights protesters. Ashcroft and others pushed a false narrative
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that such restrictions left the FBI helpless to prevent terrorism
while regearing the Bureau toward the preventative approach.

The preventative approach to terrorism is rooted in the long history
of FBI political spying. For many of the Hoover years, the FBI used a
questionable interpretation of Presidential Directives to claim it had
the right to investigate subversive activities. In the early 1970s,
following Hoover’s death and growing criticism of the FBI, the
Bureau concocted a new legal theory: The FBI’s intelligence
gathering on political groups was justified by the need to prevent
violations of a handful of federal statutes. Barry Goldwater and
others then turned the same logic toward terrorism. Through a
dissenting opinion
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the Church Committee, white papers from right-wing think tanks
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and a Reagan-era Senate subcommittee
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on terrorism, the narrative was crafted that restricting FBI
investigations to those with actual suspicion of a crime meant the FBI
could not prevent terrorism.

Today, the FBI still operates under Mukasey’s guidelines
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guidelines tell FBI agents not to “wait for leads to come in through
the actions of others, but rather must be vigilant in detecting
terrorist activities to the full extent permitted by law, with an eye
towards early intervention and prevention of acts of terrorism before
they occur.” The guidelines dramatically lowered the bar to open a
case by creating a new category of investigation called an
“assessment.” FBI officers can start an “assessment” without a
factual predication, i.e. evidence, to believe the subject may violate
federal law or threaten national security, allowing the FBI to engage
in incredibly intrusive techniques like tasking an informant to
clandestinely spy on someone or rifle through their trash.

On paper, the FBI is not allowed to open an investigation _solely _on
First Amendment-protected speech. But in practice, the loose
guidelines and preventative framework open the door to exactly that.
For example, an FBI agent or local police officer acting as a Task
Force Officer is told to find potential terrorists and disrupt them
before they strike. They are warned that the priority is “anarchist
extremists
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And they are told that anarchists extremists are those who oppose
[[link removed]] “capitalism, corporate
globalization” or “perceived economic, social, or racial
hierarchies.” How else does an agent interpret that mandate, other
than to locate and surveil those who express those opinions?

Even before the creation of assessments, FBI documents released under
FOIA show, agents often merely regurgitated
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the beliefs that make up supposed extremist groups as the predicate
for their investigation. When justifying opening an terrorist
enterprise investigation into a nonviolent Palestine solidarity group,
for example, FBI agents referenced their “predisposition to
anti-capitalist and anti-global philosophy.” The language comes
directly from the FBI’s definition of anarchist extremism. And now
NSPM-7 has added a whole new list of suspect ideologies
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as being behind violence, including vague categories like
“anti-Americanism” or “extremism on gender.” During Trump’s
first term, similar high-level hysteria about Antifa led to the FBI
and its JTTFs to question George Floyd protesters about Antifa.

The open invitation to target political speech is made even worse by
the fact that the FBI treats “civil unrest” or violations of
federal riot statutes as terrorism. In theory, any protest could
transform into a riot. In the past, the FBI has distributed
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intelligence bulletins to local law enforcement alerting them to
common tactics used during protest. A Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel
opinion found nothing unconstitutional with the FBI preemptively
monitoring
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protests if the stated goal was looking for terrorism. NSPM-7 makes
clear it is doubling down on the FBI’s preventative framework, as
well as the treatment of civil unrest as terrorism.

NSPM-7 features two other notable changes. For one, it calls for the
use of the Foreign Agent Registration Act against “non-governmental
organizations and American citizens residing abroad or with close ties
to foreign governments, agents, citizens, foundations, or influence
networks.” This might appear strange in a memorandum on combatting
domestic terrorism. But it closely mirrors calls
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Republicans for similar actions to be taken against Americans based on
conspiracy theories about China being behind domestic protests for
immigrants’ or Palestinian rights.

It also creates a pipeline of intelligence from the FBI’s Joint
Terrorism Task Force to Trump that passes through the Assistant to the
President and the Homeland Security Advisor–Stephen Miller. Miller
is responsible for some of the most inflammatory language about
crushing the domestic left. He has also been using his role on the
Homeland Security Council to consolidate his own power. Miller played
a central role
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in the Trump administration’s politically motivated deportations of
pro-Palestinian students, and he has been guiding
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Trump’s extrajudicial executions of alleged Venezuelan drug
traffickers in international waters. And now Miller will be the
intermediary between the White House and the FBI and Attorney General
as they carry out Trump’s crackdown on the political left.

While this consolidation of power into the Homeland Security Council,
and into the hands of Miller, is a troubling reorganization of the
national security leviathan, nearly all of what Trump is doing is
firmly rooted in existing powers. To carry out the renewed war on
left-wing protest, Trump has not needed to pass new laws nor create
new agencies. For decades, the FBI and other executive branch agencies
have amassed powers to investigate Americans on the premise of
combating terrorism. No matter who was in office, the FBI has abused
these powers to spy on dissent.

_Chip Gibbons is policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, where
he edits the Gaza First Amendment Alert. He is the author of the
forthcoming book The Imperial Bureau: The FBI, Political Surveillance,
and the Rise of the U.S. National Security State._

_At a time when the world desperately needs hard-hitting journalism,
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