Trump Doesn’t Care if You’re Actually “Antifa”
President Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on liberal and left-wing groups following the assasination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and the shooting at an ICE field office in Dallas this month. Over the course of a few days, he signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” and a presidential memorandum directing federal law enforcement to investigate “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” Meanwhile, the FBI is reportedly considering labeling transgender people or groups as “nihilistic violent extremists,” while members of the administration have been casting criticism of ICE and other agencies as authoritarian or fascist as language that “incites violence and terrorism.”
The administration’s elastic and vague definition of what constitutes left-wing violence has made experts worry that it can be applied to anyone who opposes its policies, echoing other authoritarian regimes across the globe. I called Mark Bray, a history professor at Rutgers University and the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, to talk about the ultimate goal of Trump’s executive actions, the risks for anyone who protests the administration, and how authoritarian governments exploit real and perceived crises. “It’s no coincidence that these things are happening after the Charlie Kirk shooting,” he says. “They’re trying to take advantage of that.”
In his executive order, Trump says, “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” What do you make of that definition?
Anti-fascists are anti-militarist, actually. A lot of members of antifa groups are anarchists, but not all of them. So that’s an overgeneralization. It is true that a lot of members of antifa groups would very much like to see a different system of societal organization and to get rid of the U.S. government, but not all of them. The thing is, it’s not as if Trump and his allies care whether these characterizations are true or accurate. They don’t care. They’re trying to portray antifa as this bogeyman and use it as a label that can be applied as being synonymous with terrorism for any individual or group who opposes the administration.
You mentioned antifa groups. For people who are not familiar with what antifa is: Are we talking about one centralized group or multiple groups? Is this a political philosophy? How would you describe it?
Antifa is short for anti-fascist in a number of different languages. It’s a kind of pan-radical-left militant politics, strategy, or a movement for opposing fascism in the far right. The history of the anti-fascist movement goes back 100 years, but the specific strain of what is sometimes also referred to as militant anti-fascism can be traced to postwar Europe, which spread over to the U.S. as well.
I sometimes compare it to feminism. There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group. It’s more of an adjective. Some groups in the U.S. call themselves that; some don’t. Sometimes they share resources or coordinate activities, but it’s decentralized politics. There is no one headquarters, or a leader, or singular organization. In fact, the vast majority of the people who participate in these groups reject that form of political organizing to begin with. Again, I don’t think Trump and his allies care that is the truth. For what it’s worth, I was involved with Occupy Wall Street in New York City in 2011, and the right always assumes that radical organizing is a mirror image of itself, with a hierarchy and a big budget and a leader. For radical-left politics, it’s often not the case. The focus on the money aspect of this is really ridiculous because there’s barely any money.
These actions seem to be Trump’s first move making good on his promise to hold the “radical left” responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Setting aside the fact that we still don’t have any evidence linking the suspected gunman to any political group, the executive order labels antifa specifically a domestic terrorist organization. Meanwhile, the memorandum directs federal law enforcement to investigate “domestic terrorism and organized political violence,” which Trump has blamed on the left. What do these two efforts together signal to you?
It is certainly true that Tyler Robinson did not seem to have any really ideologically consistent, definable politics. It seems to also be the case for the suspect who shot up the Dallas ICE facility this week. It’s also true of Luigi Mangione. The fact that they’re lumping all these in as an indictment of the left is not accurate, but of course it serves their narrative.
In 2020, during Black Lives Matter protests, Trump tried to blame the entire social upheaval that we witnessed in the U.S. on antifa. Then you see the acronym develop of “BLM-antifa,” equating those two, when there’s no evidence to do that. To me, the endgame of all of this has always been depicting the Democratic Party as this many-headed hydra: One head is antifa, one is BLM, another is pronouns, another is “woke” and DEI and CRT, another is transgender people and feminism. It sort of takes a similar structure to the Great Replacement theory, making it so all these things are nefarious manifestations of the Democratic Party, and ultimately you can trace that all back to Jewish money in the form of George Soros.
Recently, Don Jr. took to X talking about “trantifa,” basically equating being transgender with with antifa. The game plan is to rhetorically equate them all with each other as being different manifestations of the same thing.
What’s the greatest domestic terror threat facing America?
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 17, 2025
The right often invokes antifa to try to delegitimize leftist movements and protesters, like after George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. We saw it with Charlottesville in 2017. More recently, they’ve also blamed several pro-Palestine campus protests on antifa agitators. So what could this mean for those who’ve been protesting the war in Gaza or opposing this administration in any way?
It shows the intent on the part of the administration to call anyone who opposes their agenda a terrorist. We’ll see how far it goes. But if you don’t like something the administration is doing, and you show up to your local protest carrying a sign as innocuous as that, there’s the potential that you’ll be labeled “antifa” or a terrorist.
There’s also a lot of guilt-by-association going on. The degree to which they’re targeting nonprofits, universities, the George Soros money, and so on is trying to set up this kind of spider web where anyone who speaks out is somehow stuck in the web of fallacious political slander. Of course they’re gonna start talking about the most radical manifestations of resistance and single them out. But the endgame of that in any kind of dictatorship is to create a category that you can get thrown into, such that you get discredited and possibly prosecuted. The language of this executive order and presidential memorandum is intentionally broad and vague. If you study the history of any kind of authoritarian regime — Chile, Argentina, Germany, Italy — you can see that they create categories of evil “others.” They don’t just disappear people for the hell of it. They do it because they claim that the people are in this category. The administration is in the stage of category-building at this point. They’re not just trying to build one, they’re building several and trying to equate them with each other.
They’re also very attuned to accusations that they’re fascist. J.D. Vance has spoken on this and tried to undermine the allegation by saying that, when you say that, you promote violence. Basically, making the accusation of someone being a fascist in and of itself makes you a terrorist.
What about donations? Do you think giving money to any of these groups that are organizing protests or opposing the administration in any way could be targeted?
But if you don’t like something the administration is doing, and you show up to your local protest carrying a sign as innocuous as that, there’s the potential that you’ll be labeled ‘antifa’ or a terrorist.
I have spoken to a few lawyers to allay some of my concerns about this. Right now, it’s not illegal to give money to a nonprofit organization. We have laws. They still exist, and we’ve seen instances of the courts striking down some of the things that the administration is trying to do. At this point, I would tell people that we still need to organize against the injustices in our society. I can’t tell people to stop giving money to worthy causes. The point for me is that we can see how nefarious it is that they’re trying to characterize that as support for terrorism, which is just ludicrous.
Right now, a lot of people are struggling with how everything feels bad, but it’s unclear how bad it actually is in practice. Just in the last week, you’ve had Jimmy Kimmel being pulled off air after the FCC threatened ABC and former FBI director James Comey indicted, and ICE agents continue to terrorize communities. What concerns do you have as a historian when you think about the Trump administration’s policies over the past eight months and how they compare to fascist regimes elsewhere?
When Trump started this term, I picked out three barometers that I thought would be objective for determining the degree to which his administration approached fascism. No. 1 is the degree to which they’re reducing the quality of rights, or reducing rights for as many people as possible. We’ve seen that happen particularly with migrants. We’ve seen that with their attack on trans rights, their push toward gerrymandering.
The second criterion was the creation of parallel institutions. When the Nazis created the concentration camps and the Gestapo, those were not institutions run by the German state. They were run directly by the Nazi Party itself. They pretty much left the German state as it had existed before they took power alone, so that middle-class people could be content that they still had their regular old rule of law. They just went around it by creating their own institutions outside of the German system. We haven’t exactly seen that here, but I do think that all of the resources given to ICE are a step in that direction.
The third thing that I’ve kept an eye out for was the administration’s attempt to either manufacture or take advantage of some sort of emergency or crisis, like an economic depression or natural disaster. That’s key. As bad as things have gotten, the thing to look at moving forward is a crisis that the administration can take advantage of to say, “The normal way of doing politics and government is not strong enough for the job we have to do right now. We need to take over.” The excuse is always that it’ll be temporary. The famous example in Nazi Germany was the burning down of the Reichstag in 1933. That allowed Adolf Hitler to pass the Enabling Act, which consolidated his power.
I see these executive actions as an effort to reduce the rights of people who protest. There’s always been this notion of terrorism as a kind of threat that can’t be taken care of through the realm of normal law and order. In many instances, the real or imagined threat of terrorism has emboldened states, particularly authoritarian ones, to take special measures. That’s what it feels like they’re trying to lay the groundwork for.
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