Trump Promised To Designate Antifa A Terrorist Group. Why Does That Matter?

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The Milkshake Man of Walter Reed. Hey there, there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.
I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.
I'm Ryan Lucas.

Speaker 3 I cover the Justice Department.

Speaker 4 And I'm Mara Lyasson, senior national political correspondent.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 President Trump was asked about taking this step during a roundtable with right-wing influencers earlier this month, and here's what he said.

Speaker 5 Would you like to see it done? Yes, Mr. President.
Do you think it would help?

Speaker 3 They have foreign languages. I'd be glad to do it.

Speaker 5 I think it's the kind of thing I'd like to do. If you'd like, 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.

Speaker 3 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 that question that we need to address.

Speaker 3 First off is, yes, it is, experts say, more of an ideology or a movement and not a centralized, cohesive group.

Speaker 3 Former FBI Director Christopher Wray actually testified to that before Congress a couple years ago.

Speaker 3 As for whether the president can take this step, the authority to designate a group a foreign terrorist organization lies with the State Department. There are certain criteria that have to be met.

Speaker 3 There's an office there that makes these recommendations. The criteria are: is it an organization? Is it a cohesive organization? Is it foreign?

Speaker 3 Is it engaged in terrorism that threatens Americans or American national security interests? On each of those criteria, there are serious questions as to whether Antifa would qualify.

Speaker 3 First of all, is it a cohesive organization? You and I just talked about that. You know, experts say it is not a cohesive organization.
U.S.

Speaker 3 officials have repeatedly said that this is an inherently domestic movement, not foreign.

Speaker 3 And questions of whether it's engaged in terrorist acts, particularly terrorist acts abroad, we certainly haven't seen evidence of that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, so Ryan, the president hasn't issued an executive order. There hasn't been any kind of legal paper around this, correct?

Speaker 3 Well, no, and the president doesn't have the authority to designate anyone a foreign terrorist organization. That's with the State Department.
They have the authority to do that.

Speaker 3 The president did, however, issue an executive order last month designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.

Speaker 3 The important difference here, though, is that there is no domestic terrorism statute.

Speaker 3 That doesn't have any legal meaning, so it doesn't have any legal impact.

Speaker 3 But designating something a foreign terrorist organization does have real legal teeth and would have serious repercussions kind of across life in the United States.

Speaker 3 Well, you have all these experts saying basically that Antifa does not fit any of the qualifications for what we would traditionally think of a foreign terrorist organization.

Speaker 3 I mean, how can the administration fit what is essentially a circle peg into a square hole?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, so from talking to the experts who I did, including somebody who's the lead the office at the State Department who does these designations, basically said that, look, the administration could try to make a creative argument to, as he put it, stretch the truth to get this designation over the line because it would be seen as a policy objective of the president that he wants to see happen.

Speaker 3 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 would designate Antifa a terrorist organization or take steps to do so.

Speaker 3 And so the people who I spoke to said that the administration in its creative argument could point to those and say, look, Antifa is a threat overseas and use that as part of a basis to go about making this sort of legal argument and designating it.

Speaker 3 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 people who are kind of card carrying members of Antifa?

Speaker 3 Is there a leader of Antifa? I mean,

Speaker 3 how would this actually work in practice in terms of the Justice Department or the federal government determining who is a member of Antifa if there isn't this structure?

Speaker 3 So look, one of the people who I spoke to is someone who used to run the office at the State Department who makes these designations.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 What is the structure of Antifa? Where is the funding coming from?

Speaker 3 We know that during the first Trump administration, back in 2020, the president blamed some of the violence, a a lot of the violence that we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of George Floyd.

Speaker 3 The president blamed a lot of that violence on Antifa, the sort of violence that we saw in Portland, for example.

Speaker 3 Certainly, the Justice Department looked into questions of funding, tried to map out a network, and never presented any evidence publicly of those things.

Speaker 3 I think that the fundamental question that this raises here is, if you can't define Antifa, it's a very nebulous term which allows the administration to then deem who is a member of Antifa.

Speaker 3 And I talked to Thomas Brzowski, who's the former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Justice Department.

Speaker 6 When that foreign terrorist organization is so ill-defined and nobody even knows what it is, and it potentially includes all activity that can be painted as left-wing or whatever term you'd like to hang on it, that becomes potentially catastrophically dangerous for anybody, for everybody.

Speaker 3 And so it just opens up this toolbox for the government to crack down on

Speaker 3 anybody who they see as Antifa, but they get to define what that means.

Speaker 4 Ryan, how does this compare with the other steps that the Trump administration has taken to target political opponents?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 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 actual designation yet.

Speaker 3 It's very important to say that.

Speaker 3 We're talking about the possibility of it, but it would open up a toolbox with incredibly powerful tools in it to go after all sorts of folks if it decided that it wanted to do so.

Speaker 3 Well, at this point, I feel like the weaponization of the Justice Department has been aimed at very specific people.

Speaker 3 You you know, the James Comey, the Letitia Jameses of the world. Is it possible that sort of everyday people could be swept up in this, from what you're hearing? Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Potentially.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think what it does is it would enable the administration to use the vast counterterrorism apparatus essentially that the government has created over the past 25 years since the 9-11 attacks and to turn that inward domestically.

Speaker 3 And that's tools from criminal charges to financial leverage that it could use to push the political left, essentially, if it chose to do so.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You know, there's really two parts to this, Miles.

Speaker 4 You're correct that a lot of the Department of Justice efforts have been aimed at retribution for specific people that Trump feels hurt him.

Speaker 4 But there's another part to this, which is not just retribution against Trump's enemies. It's a whole project to defund the left, destroy the left.

Speaker 4 Stephen Miller, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, has said that the Democratic Party is a domestic extremist organization.

Speaker 4 So I think this is just another step in the bigger project to make sure that there really is only one party that can win national elections, and that's the Republican Party.

Speaker 3 Assuming this happens, which again, this has not happened yet, and we're not positive it's going to happen, only that the president, as we heard before, has said he's interested in making it happen, right?

Speaker 3 Where would it go from there in terms of is it something that could be challenged in court if he were to make a designation like this?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, 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,

Speaker 3 who would step forward to challenge the designation? And that's something that the experts that I spoke to all pointed to.

Speaker 3 So even if individuals could challenge specific actions that they faced, the underlying designation would remain in place.

Speaker 3 All right, we're going to take a quick break and more on all of this in just a moment.

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Speaker 3 And we're back, and we've been talking about President Trump saying he would designate Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization.

Speaker 3 Ryan, what kind of broader implications could this move have on civil society?

Speaker 3 Well, look, the most immediate impact of this would be the ability for federal prosecutors to bring what's known as material support to a designated terrorist organization, those criminal charges.

Speaker 3 This has been kind of the bread and butter charge of federal prosecutors in cases against supporters of al-Qaeda and ISIS over the years. And material support is very broadly defined.

Speaker 3 It can be financial support, it can be educational support, but it can also be something as small as, say, a $10 gift card, a bottle of water.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so federal prosecutors could bring that charge against anybody who provides anything like that, even as small as a bottle of water, to

Speaker 3 something associated with Antifa.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 cities. So, this is part and parcel of how Trump wants to militarize the United States and also take all sorts of powers for himself that no other president has ever done.

Speaker 3 Okay, so basically we have this kind of amorphous group and the possibility of really serious charges being brought against anyone who supports this, what is essentially an ideology.

Speaker 3 I feel like, Ryan, that could lead to some other downstream impacts of people being really scared to associate with anything that could even vaguely be considered part of this ideology, right?

Speaker 3 That's sort of the chilling effect, I think, is what you're getting at there.

Speaker 3 But there are also just kind of cascading effects that we would see across civil society, all sorts of sectors from experts who I spoke to. There would be an impact on social media, for example.

Speaker 3 The experts who I spoke to noted that social media companies take their cues from the government on which groups are dangerous to keep them off their platforms.

Speaker 3 So you would see communications, posts that could be associated with Antifa would likely be taken down.

Speaker 3 Social media companies could create mechanisms to proactively take such stuff down and report it to the government when they see it.

Speaker 3 So that would immediately dial back what would be seen online, the sort of news and information that would be available. You also have a potential impact on universities.

Speaker 3 Universities could scale back back conferences that could be associated with anti-fascism, the study of anti-fascism. Faculty research could be curtailed for the same reason.

Speaker 3 And one thing that I hadn't really thought about until I spoke to a number of people is the potential impact from insurance companies.

Speaker 3 Insurance companies are not going to insure universities, foundations, nonprofits, think tanks that could be associated or be perceived to be associated with anything related to Antifa and anti-fascism.

Speaker 3 And so that would have drastic impacts and major implications on what people are willing to do and potentially be associated with.

Speaker 3 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 all of these different aspects become risky.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 In other words, if it's defined so broadly, broadly, don't forget, Trump said explicitly that he thinks that negative press coverage of him should be illegal.

Speaker 4 So, 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 Kings Day protests.

Speaker 4 He said the protesters are pro-Hamas.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 I had the exact same thought, Mark, because as covering voting, I talk to a lot of people who are kind of pro-democracy or they identify as pro-democracy.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 In the dictionary definition, yes. But Donald Trump decides now.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 Well, getting to the politics of all this, I mean, is this a politically popular move, Mara?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so I guess, yeah, I don't know. How do you feel about this?

Speaker 4 I think it would be very hard to poll on this because people don't know what Antifa is.

Speaker 4 But I do think that if you look at every single thing that the president has done beyond deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed a crime, everything he's done is unpopular.

Speaker 4 That doesn't mean that he's losing overall support among his base, but I think that depending on how broadly the administration wants to define this, I would assume this would get the same kind of reaction that his other policies have, like you know, ice-grabbing people or all sorts of other things, even tariffs.

Speaker 4 I mean, most of the things that Trump has done have polled poorly.

Speaker 4 But he, because he has such strong support among his base, even when Republicans don't approve of his policies, they still approve of him.

Speaker 3 One of the things that we've mentioned it a couple of times is all of this depends on the administration following through and actually designating Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization.

Speaker 3 I don't know that they're going to do that. I asked the State Department, which of course has the authority to do this, whether they've begun this process.

Speaker 3 The State Department said Antifa represents a dangerous threat to law and order. The U.S.

Speaker 3 has a variety of options to target terrorists and terrorist organizations, and the State Department will use all available tools to keep America safe.

Speaker 3 The question of whether they will or not, though, when I was talking to Thomas Brzowski, the former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Justice Department,

Speaker 3 he said ultimately, there's good reason to believe they will.

Speaker 3 And here's why he feels that way.

Speaker 6 The president himself, during a roundtable at the White House, turned to his senior advisors whose job it is to designate these entities and instructed them to do it on TV.

Speaker 6 So, yeah, I think they might do it.

Speaker 6 People aren't ready for it.

Speaker 6 People are not ready for it. If that goes through,

Speaker 6 I'm telling you,

Speaker 3 unbelievable.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 What do you think, Mara?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Look at what happened to any prosecutor who prosecuted Trump. So I think that in general, Trump's exercise or expansion of executive power has already caused a chilling effect.

Speaker 4 And I think that people are very careful about criticizing criticizing him because they're worried about the consequences. Now, I think the Antifa thing is just yet another part of that.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And I would say that the chilling effect has come from the executive order that the president issued last month designating Antifa domestic terrorism organizations.

Speaker 3 It doesn't have legal meaning, but the practical impacts of signaling to the Americans and then kind of planting that bug in their brain that this is a terrorist organization, even though experts say it doesn't exist, that it's in ideology, but it plants that idea, and that becomes the kind of the thought and the rhetoric around it.

Speaker 3 All right, well, we can leave it there for 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.

Speaker 3 Tomorrow night, we'll be taping in front of a live audience here in D.C. in honor of our 10th anniversary.
If you can't make it, don't worry, we have you covered.

Speaker 3 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 the Justice Department.

Speaker 4 And I'm Mara Lyasson, the Senior National Political Correspondent.

Speaker 3 And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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