Trump Promised To Designate Antifa A Terrorist Group. Why Does That Matter?
00:00Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air.Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with usand listen to long-form interviewswith your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians, and musicians,the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times.So listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.Hey, NPR.This is Chinisa calling from the state capital rotunda in Jefferson City, Missouri,
00:27where my uncle, the milkshake man of Walter Reed,was just inducted into the Missouri Veterans Hall of Fame.Oh, congrats.This podcast was recorded at 1124 a.m. on Wednesday, October 29th, 2025.Things may have changed by the time you hear this,but I will never stop beaming with pride.Love you, Uncle Jim.The milkshake man.
00:52I'm Googling it.I'm Googling it.That's awesome.That is awesome.Yeah.There he is right here. Anyone else can Google it as well, the milkshake man of Walter Reed.Hey there. It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.
01:08And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.And today on the show, we're talking about the possibility of the Trump administration designating Antifa, the far-left movement or ideology that's opposed to fascism as a foreign terrorist organization.President Trump was asked about taking this step during a roundtable with right-wing influencers earlier this month.what he said. Would you like to see it done? Yes, Mr. President. You think it would help? Theyhave foreign legs all across Western Europe. I think it's the kind of thing I'd like to do.If you'd like to, does everybody agree? If you agree, I agree. Let's get it done. Okay? Let's get it done.Marco, we'll take care of it. Ryan, let's just start here. This is a decentralized movement,if I'm not mistaken. Can the president really take this step? So there are a couple parts of
01:51that question that we need to address. First off is, yes, it is experts say a more of an ideology ormovement and not a centralized cohesive group. Former FBI director Christopher Ray actuallytestified to that before Congress a couple years ago. As for whether the president can takethis step, the authority to designate a group, a foreign terrorist organization lies withthe State Department. There are certain criteria that have to be met. There's an officethere that makes these recommendations. The criteria are, is it an organization? Is it acohesive organization? Is it foreign? Is it engaged in terrorism that threatens Americans orAmerican national security interests. On each of those criteria, there are serious questions
02:32as to whether Antifa would qualify. First of all, is it a cohesive organization? You and I justtalked about that, you know, experts say it is not a cohesive organization. U.S. officials haverepeatedly said that this is an inherently domestic movement, not foreign, and questions of whetherit's engaged in terrorist acts, particularly terrorist acts abroad. We certainly haven't seenevidence of that. But this gets to a bigger question.of whether it's something that the administration really wants to make happen, whether they could do so.So, Ryan, the president has an issue an executive order. There hasn't been any kind of legalpaper around this, correct? Well, no. And the president doesn't have the authority to designate
03:11anyone a foreign terrorist organization. That's with the State Department. They have the authorityto do that. The president did, however, issue an executive order last month, designated Antifa,a domestic terrorist organization. The important difference here, though, is that there isno domestic terrorism statute. There is no, that doesn't have any legal meaning. So it doesn'thave any legal impact. But designating something, a foreign terrorist organization does have reallegal teeth and would have serious repercussions, kind of across life in the United States.Well, you have all these experts saying basically that Antifa does not fit any of thequalifications for what we would traditionally think of a foreign terrorist organization. I mean,
03:50how can the administration fit what is essentially a circle peg into a square hole? So from talking tothe experts who I did, including somebody who used to lead the office at the State Departmentwho does these designations, basically said that, look, that the administration could try to makea creative argument to, as he put it, stretch the truth to get this designation over the line becauseit would be seen as a policy objective of the president that he wants to see happen.Shortly after Trump said that he was going to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization,far-right allies in Europe, in Hungary, and the Netherlands said that they, too, woulddesignate Antifa a terrorist organization or take steps to do so. And so the people who I spoke to
04:32so that the administration in its creative argument could point to those and say, look, Antifa is athreat overseas and use that as part of a basis to go about making this sort of legal argumentin designating it. Well, this is what I'm a little bit unclear on because getting to this idea,which I think is the key idea here, about it not being a real kind of organization. Are there peoplewho are kind of card-carrying members of Antifa? Is there a leader of Antifa? I mean, how wouldthis actually work in practice in terms of the Justice Department or the federal governmentdetermining who is a member of Antifa if there isn't this structure? So look, one of the peoplewho I spoke to is someone who used to run the office at the State Department, who makes these
05:14designations. And what he said is, I would really like to hear the State Department or the U.S.government say, who is the leader of Antifa? What is the, the structure?structure of Antifa. Where is the funding coming from? We know that during the first Trumpadministration, back in 2020, the president blamed some of the violence, a lot of theviolence that we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of GeorgeFloyd. The president blamed a lot of that violence on Antifa, the sort of violence that we sawin Portland, for example. Certainly, the Justice Department looked into questions of funding,tried to map out a network and never presented any evidence publicly of those.
05:53things. I think that the fundamental question that this raises here is, if you can't defineAntifa, it's a very nebulous term which allows the administration to then deem who is a memberof Antifa. And I talked to Thomas Brzeowski, who's the former counsel for domestic terrorismat the Justice Department. When that foreign terrorist organization is so ill-defined and nobody evenknows what it is, and it potentially includes all activity that can be painted as left-wing orwhatever term you'd like to hang on it, that becomes potentially catastrophically dangerous foranybody, for everybody. And so it just opens up this toolbox for the government to crack downon anybody who they see as Antifa, but they get to define what that means.
06:43Ryan, how does this compare with the other steps that the Trump administration has taken totarget political opponents? It sounds like this is part of his larger project.to intimidate and terrorize and maybe defund all sorts of people that he considers enemies,and particularly the universe of groups that fund Democratic candidates.First of all, they have not taken this step yet.Yeah.This is something that he talked about at the White House on TV, but there hasn't been an actualdesignation yet.
07:12It's very important to say that.We're talking about the possibility of it.But it would open up a toolbox with incredibly powerful tools in it to go after allsorts of folks if it decided that it wanted to do so. Well, at this point, I feel like the weaponizationof the Justice Department has been aimed at very specific people. You know, the James Comey, the LetitiaJameses of the world. Is it possible that sort of everyday people could be swept up in thisfrom what you're hearing? Potentially, I mean, I think what it does is it would enable the administrationto use the vast counterterrorism apparatus essentially that the government has created over the past 25
07:52years since the 9-11 attacks and to turn that inward domestically. And that's tools fromcriminal charges to financial leverage that it could use to push the political left essentiallyif it chose to do so. You know, there's really two parts of this, Miles. You're correct thata lot of the Department of Justice efforts have been aimed at retribution for specific peoplethat Trump feels hurt him. But there's another part to this, which is not just retributionagainst Trump's enemies. It's a whole project to defund the left, destroy the left.Stephen Miller, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, has said that the Democratic Party is a domesticextremist organization. So I think this is just another step in the bigger project to make sure
08:39that there really is only one party that can win national elections, and that's the Republican Party.Assuming this happens, which again, this has not happened yet, and we're not positive it's going tohappen. Only that the president, as we heard before, has said he's interested in making it happen, right?Where would it go from there in terms of, is it something that could be challenged in court if hewere to make a designation like this? This is something that could be challenged in court.The fundamental kind of problem that it might run into is if there is no Antifa, who wouldstep forward to challenge the designation? And that's something that the experts that I spoke to allpointed to. So even if individuals could challenge specific actions that they faced, the
09:20underlying designation would remain in place. All right. We're going to take a quick break and moreon all of this in just a moment. And we're back. And we've been talking about President Trump sayinghe would designate Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization. Ryan, what kind of broader implicationscould this move have on civil society? Well, look, the most immediate impact of this would be theability for federal prosecutors to bring what's known as material support to a designatedterrorist organization, those criminal charges. This has been kind of the bread and buttercharge of federal prosecutors in cases against supporters of al-Qaeda and ISIS over the years.And material support is very broadly defined. It can be financial support. It can be educational
10:04support, but it can also be something as small as, say, a $10 gift card, a bottle of water.So it can be very small things, but there's a potential penalty of up to 20 years in prison.So it's a very significant charge.And so federal prosecutors could bring that charge against anybody who provides anything like that, even as small as a bottle of water, to something associated with Antifa.And, you know, the other thing this does is it really helps Donald Trump tell the story that he's been telling.He's a very good storyteller.He stood in front of hundreds of military officers and told them that soon they would be fighting the enemy within, that they would be using.the vast powers of the U.S. military to train in U.S. cities. So this part and parcel of how Trump
10:52wants to militarize the United States and also take all sorts of powers for himself that no otherpresident has ever done. Okay. So basically, we have this kind of amorphous group and the possibilityof really serious charges being brought against anyone who supports this, what is essentiallyan ideology. I feel like, Ryan, that could lead to some other downstreamimpacts of people being really scared to associate with anything that could even vaguely beconsidered part of this ideology, right?That's sort of the chilling effect, I think, is what you're getting at there.But they're also just kind of cascading effects that we would see across civil society,
11:31all sorts of sectors from experts who I spoke to.There would be an impact on social media, for example.The experts who I spoke to noted that social media companies take their cues from thegovernment on which groups are dangerous.to keep them off their platforms.So you would see communications,posts that could be associated with Antifawould likely be taken down.
11:53Social media companies could create mechanismsto proactively take such stuff downand report it to the government when they see it.So that would immediately dial backwhat would be seen online,the sort of news and informationthat would be available.You also have a potential impact on universities.
12:11Universities could scale back conferencesthat could be associated.with anti-fascism, the study of anti-fascism.Faculty research could be curtailed for the same reason.And one thing that I hadn't really thought aboutuntil I spoke to a number of peopleis the potential impact from insurance companies.Insurance companies are not going to ensure
12:31universities, foundations, non-profits, think tanksthat could be associated or be perceivedto be associated with anything relatedto Antifa and anti-fascism.And so that would have drastic impacts and major implications on what people are willing to do and potentially be associated with.That kind of gets back to Mara's point of basically just kind of attacking all angles of like it becomes really hard to be an organization essentially if you can't be insured or you can all of these different aspects become risky.Well, especially if Antifa is defined as anti-Trump because we started out this conversation by saying there really isn't a thing called Antifa.In other words, if it's defined so broadly, don't forget, Trump said explicitly that he thinks that negative press coverage of him should be illegal.
13:20So, you know, if this morphs into a more general thing, if you're anti-Trump, you're also pro-Antifa, not unlike what the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson said about the big no-Kingsday protests.He said the protesters are pro-Hamas.I mean, if that's where this is going to be this extremely broad-brushed definition,it will just allow Trump to have more leverage against the people he thinks are against him, to defund them and to make them illegal.I had the exact same thought, Mark, because I, as covering voting, I talked to a lot of people who are kind of pro-democracy or they identify as pro-democracy.And I guess by definition, if you're pro-democracy, aren't you somewhat anti-fascism?I don't know.You're being too literal.
14:04In the dictionary definition, yes.But Donald Trump decides now.And if he thinks that pro-democracy means anti-Trump, then being a pro-democracy organization maybe ends up meaning that you're going to become illegal.Well, getting to the politics of all this, I mean, is this a politically popular move more?I do feel like I've seen some polling that indicates people are feeling a little bit squeamish about how President Trump has treated the First Amendment so far in his term.And so I guess, yeah, I don't know.How do you feel about this?I think it would be very hard to poll on this because people don't know what Antifa is,
14:40but I do think that if you look at every single thing that the president has donebeyond deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed a crime, everything he's done isunpopular. That doesn't mean that he's losing overall support among his base, but I thinkthat depending on how broadly the administration wants to define this, I would assume this wouldget the same kind of reaction that his other policies have, like, you know, ice grabbing peopleor all sorts of other things, even tariffs. I mean, most of the things that Trump has done havepolled poorly. But he, because he has such strong support among his base, even when Republicansdon't approve of his policies, they still approve of him. One of the things that we've mentioned
15:25it a couple times is all of this depends on the administration following through and actuallydesignating Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization. I don't know that they're going to do that. Iask the State Department, which of course has the authority to do this, whether they've begun this process.The State Department said Antifa represents a dangerous threat to law and order. The U.S. has a variety of options to target terrorists and terrorist organizations in the State Department.We'll use all available tools to keep America safe. The question of whether they will or not, though, when I was talking to Thomas Prisowski, the former Counsel for Domestic Terrorism at the Justice Department, he said,ultimately there's good reason to believe they will, and here's why he feels that way.The president himself, during a roundtable at the White House, turned to a senior advisorwhose job it is to designate these entities and instructed them to do it on TV.
16:18So, yeah, I think they might do it.People aren't ready for it.People are not ready for it.If that goes through, I'm telling you.Unbelievable.So that's somebody with knowledge of what this would open up, and you can hear how concerned he is about what it might mean.Wow. So, I mean, even getting out of this, will he, won't he mindset, I do wonder about whether just the impending threat of the possibility is already going to lead to some level of chilling effect. What do you think, Mara?Well, I think that that chilling effect has already started, and it's not even about Antifa. I mean, look at what happened to law firms and universities. Look at what happened to any prosecution.
16:59prosecutor who prosecuted Trump. So I think that in general, Trump's exercise or expansion ofexecutive power has already caused a chilling effect. And I think that people are very carefulabout criticizing him because they're worried about the consequences. Now, I think the Antifa thingis just yet another part of that. And I would say that the chilling effect has come from theexecutive order that the president issued last month designated Antifa domestic terrorismorganizations. It doesn't havelegal meaning, but thepractical impacts of signaling
17:34to the Americans and then kind of planningthat bug in their brain thatthis is a terrorist organization,even though experts say it doesn't exist, that it'sin ideology. But itplants that idea, and thatbecomes the kind of the thought and therhetoric around it. All right, well, we can leave it there
17:50for today. Mara, thank you so much for joining us.I know you're not feeling great, but feel better.Thanks. And just one more thing.Tomorrow night, we'll be taping in front of a lotaudience here in D.C. in honor of our 10th anniversary. If you can't make it, don't worry,we have you covered. A version of that live show will be in your feed late tomorrow night,so make sure to check it out. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover theJustice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you
18:16for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.
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