At a White House event earlier this week, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether he planned to designate antifa as a domestic terror organization. “It’s something I would do, yeah,” the president responded, adding: “Antifa is terrible.”
Two days later, NBC News reported:
Trump said on social media that he would designate antifa as a terrorist organization and recommend investigating those deemed responsible for funding it. … The post provided few details, including how he’d make the designation or how he would target antifa — which lacks centralized leadership and structure.
“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,” Trump wrote by way of his social media platform. “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.”
Right off the bat, it’s important to emphasize that there is no formal antifa “organization” to speak of. The entity, to the extent that it exists, is made up of loosely affiliated anti-fascist activists. There is no budget. There is no membership list. There are no offices or headquarters. There are no staffers, leaders or board members.
At some level, Trump really ought to understand this: He announced more than five years ago that he was designating antifa as a terrorist organization, and the effort was a counterproductive bust. What’s more, given that the United States does not have a domestic terrorism law, it’s not altogether clear exactly what the administration intends to do, exactly, in the wake of this presidential declaration. But before anyone makes jokes about Trump categorizing a nonexistent organization as a “major terrorist organization,” or shrugs this off as the latest presidential nonsense, there’s another dimension to this that’s worth worrying about: If the White House says that antifa members are terrorists, and the White House says it will decide on its own who and what qualifies as “antifa” affiliates, this can get very scary, very quickly.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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