President Donald Trump’s crackdown on domestic dissent is accelerating following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The president said on Thursday that he will designate antifa as a “major terrorist organization.” What does that mean, exactly?
The White House “did not immediately offer more details” on how the process would work, said The Associated Press. Complicating matters: “Antifa” is “not a singular entity” but rather an umbrella term for a cluster of groups that “resist fascists and neo-Nazis, especially at demonstrations.” American supporters can be prosecuted for giving “material support” to organizations on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations. But there is “no domestic equivalent to that list” because of the First Amendment’s protection of free expression. And it is not clear how the federal government could go after what is “effectively a decentralized movement.”
Trump made a similar designation of antifa in 2020, “but nothing came of it,” said The New York Times. The president is “less constrained now,” however, and Democratic critics say he is using Kirk’s death “as a pretext to suppress political dissent.” The White House is clearly already “pushing the limits of the president’s terrorism designation powers” by using them to go after foreign drug traffickers “even though they are motivated by profit, not religion or ideology.”
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Trump’s “move is illegal,” said Edith Olmsted at The New Republic. While Congress has granted the State Department authority to make similar designations of foreign groups, it has “granted no such power to the executive branch to designate domestic groups.” It is true that “counterprotesters acting under the antifa banner” have committed acts of violence, but right-wing violence is far more frequent: One database counts 391 right-wing murders over the last 50 years, compared to 65 left-wing homicides. Trump’s attempt to go after antifa is a “reactionary move.”
The president’s 2020 attempt to undermine antifa was a “counterproductive bust,” but the “sequel will likely be worse,” said Steve Benen at MSNBC. The lack of a domestic terror law makes it “not altogether clear exactly what the administration intends to do” in the wake of Trump’s latest designation. But that does not mean it should be taken lightly. If the White House says that “antifa members are terrorists” and can also decide who and what counts as “antifa,” then this “can get very scary, very quickly.”
What next?
At least one other world leader is following Trump’s example. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán said Friday he too will designate antifa a terror group, said CNN. Orbán is a proponent of “illiberal democracy,” and his efforts in Hungary is “often credited with inspiring Trump’s playbook for government.” His announcement “shows that the relationship can go both ways.”
There are concerns by civil libertarians that Trump’s designation could “lead to broad First Amendment violations,” said NPR. Legal challenges are likely. It is easy to imagine the government will be “targeting very broadly anybody who might potentially be considered to be anti-fascist," said Faiza Patel, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
