U.S. President Donald Trump says he will designate antifa as a terrorist organization and is ordering investigations into those who allegedly fund the group.
Without providing details on how or when the designation will occur, the president stated his intention on Truth Social on Wednesday night.
“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he wrote.
According to CBS News, antifa is not an actual body but a loose term referring to anti-fascist activists with mostly left-leaning political affiliations, and it’s not generally thought to be a financially backed, highly organized collective.
The president said he would take the same action in 2020, during his first term, but did not follow through.
Since the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, Trump and his allies have ramped up their criticism of what they say are acts of “radical left” violence.
Shortly after Kirk was killed last week, Trump promised in a national address to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
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Earlier this week, Trump told reporters that designating antifa a terrorist organization is “something I would do,” though the legal ramifications of his threat are unclear.
According to the BBC, while current rules permit the U.S. State Department to list foreign terror organizations — which makes funding or providing material support to those groups a crime — freedom of speech rights laid out in the constitution limit the president’s ability to ban or halt funding for domestic groups such as antifa.
Prof. David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, told the BBC that “Under the First Amendment, no one can be punished for joining a group or giving money to a group,” adding that Trump designating an organization a “major terrorist organization” has no impact on “those fundamental rights.”
The president’s limited ability to punish left-wing activists is further outlined in a 2023 Congressional Research report titled “Understanding and Conceptualizing Domestic Terrorism: Issues for Congress.”
“Unlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with DT (Domestic Terrorism), which sometimes makes it difficult (and occasionally controversial) to formally characterize someone as a domestic terrorist,” the report states.
A study published in October 2024 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that “the number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined.”
Between 2020 and 2024, terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. have primarily been directed at government, military and law enforcement targets, CSIS says, with 50 such plots taking place between January 2020 and April 2024.
This is followed by 38 incidents targeting private individuals, 19 targeting religious institutions and 13 targeting demonstrators.
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