Trump‘s Counterterrorism Strategy Puts Anti-Fascists on Terror Watch List — Experts Call It Amateurish and “Completely Corrupt”

The Trump Administration’s 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy places left-wing activists — including anarchists and anti-fascists — on equal footing with Islamist terrorists and narcoterrorist cartels, marking the first time in modern American counterterrorism history that domestic left-wing movements have been formally elevated to a co-equal national security priority. Critics are calling it “completely corrupt.” Architects of the strategy are calling it “delicious.” And national security experts publishing in major outlets are calling it amateurish policymaking shaped more by politics than strategy.

The strategy, released in May 2026, establishes three official categories of terrorist threat. The first two — narcoterrorists and legacy Islamist groups — echo the priorities of prior administrations. The third does not.

A Third Category Unlike Any Before

The strategy names “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a formal counterterrorism target — and then defines them not by acts of violence, but by holding certain beliefs. The document describes this group as people the administration deems to be “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” No act of violence is required to fall within that designation. Ideology is sufficient.

That definition does not stop at the strategy document. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 — NSPM-7 — which Trump issued last September, the administration’s vaguely defined domestic enemies are typified not only by “support for the overthrow of the United States Government” but also by advocacy of opinions clearly protected by the First Amendment, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Read together, the strategy and NSPM-7 make explicit what the administration’s critics have warned: the Trump administration considers any American who it believes has “adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life” to be a terror threat. The word “violent” in the category name is not doing the definitional work one might expect.

Under prior administrations — both Democratic and Republican — U.S. counterterrorism doctrine focused domestic threat assessments primarily on Islamist radicalization and, in recent years, right-wing violent extremism. No prior national security strategy elevated left-wing domestic political movements into the same counterterrorism framework used to target groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS.

The 2026 strategy does exactly that.

What does it mean when the federal government’s counterterrorism machinery — the same apparatus built for drone strikes and rendition operations — formally trains its sights on domestic political movements whose qualifying characteristic is their ideology? The strategy itself attempts to preempt that question. It states that CT powers will not be used “to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us.” But the document simultaneously tasks law enforcement with “domestic mapping, membership identification,” and disruption of violent secular political groups it describes as holding “pro-transgender” and anarchist ideologies — groups defined, in the document’s own language, by what they believe rather than what they have done.

International Backdrop: “Amateur Hour” in the Middle of a China Visit

The release and subsequent expert criticism of the strategy arrived as Trump was visiting China — a timing that sharpened concerns about the administration’s grip on global security priorities across multiple simultaneous fronts. With Iranian tensions simmering and the U.S. engaged in diplomatic and strategic manoeuvres across Asia, the document’s release landed into an already volatile international environment.

Tom Nichols, a national security expert writing in The Atlantic, delivered one of the sharpest assessments of the strategy’s fitness for that moment, describing it as superficial, politically motivated, and riddled with errors. Nichols raised concerns that the strategy lacks the depth and rigor required to address contemporary security threats, and characterized the approach as amateurish policymaking — arguing the framework fails to account for the complexities of modern counterterrorism operations and appears shaped more by political considerations than strategic necessity.

The critique landed as a crucial document — one that should guide military and intelligence operations globally for the coming year — was being evaluated not by allies but by adversaries watching the administration’s foreign policy priorities in real time.

“Commonsense Counterterrorism” vs. “A Lawless Killing Spree”

The strategy’s architects are not shy about their satisfaction with the document. Sebastian Gorka — the U.S. counterterrorism official believed to have authored the report — explained after its release: “Very simply, it’s commonsense counterterrorism based on reality not fake threats.”

Gorka described the public reaction in similarly triumphant terms. “Even the left, they’re so on their heels,” he said. “I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy. Fifty articles were written. … Only one of them … was even slightly negative.” He added: “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us — which is delicious.”

Dean Cain, his interviewer, responded: “That’s wonderful.”

Not everyone shares that assessment. “If the U.S. government counterterrorism enterprise hadn’t jumped the shark before, it certainly has now,” said Finucane. “The administration has repurposed the terrorism framing and applied it not only to alleged narcos but also perceived domestic political opponents — as we saw with the way the administration baselessly smeared Renee Good and Alex Pretti as ‘terrorists’ after gunning them down. The whole situation would be much funnier if the Trump administration wasn’t currently engaged in a lawless killing spree under the guise of ‘counterterrorism.’”

A separate source described the counterterrorism effort as “completely corrupt.”

“Not Much of a Strategy” — An Expert Dissects the Document

Colin Clarke, executive director of The Soufan Center and a specialist in domestic and international terrorism, offered a blunt initial assessment of the strategy: “It’s about what I expected, if not a little bit subpar.”

Clarke told PBS NewsHour that the document gets some things right — the focus on hostages and wrongfully detained persons, the threat of terrorist acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, and the enduring danger posed by jihadist groups. But he identified significant failures. “It gets wrong the omission of far right terrorist groups,” he said. “It doesn’t deal at all with domestic terrorism and homegrown violent extremism. And the entire document is riddled with partisan accusations and snubs, after proclaiming to be an apolitical document, which it unfortunately is not.”

On the strategy’s Islamist terrorism provisions, Clarke was equally skeptical. “This document is not much of a strategy,” he said. “It’s actually more of a world view. So it’s very descriptive in nature. It doesn’t tell you exactly what the United States can and should do, other than a very kinetic approach.”

That assessment aligns with Nichols’ characterization in The Atlantic: the document’s political framing overwhelms its operational substance, producing a text that describes enemies without equipping the national security apparatus to defeat them.

Clarke challenged the strategy’s inclusion of left-wing radicals and pro-transgender activists as a formal threat category, placing it in the context of what he called “reciprocal radicalization.” He acknowledged an uptick in far-left violence but pointed to far-right attacks — at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, at a Walmart in El Paso, at a supermarket in Buffalo where a white supremacist targeted Black Americans — as the larger pattern the document ignores. “But, on balance and in aggregate, far right terrorism still poses a far more significant threat than the far left does,” Clarke said. “And so to focus on one over the other and not look across the ideological spectrum comes across as cherry-picking and politicizing counterterrorism, rather than using intelligence and data-driven methods to deal with it.” By funneling resources toward left-wing extremism, he argued, the strategy crowds out the capacity to address more documented threats. “For the money, personnel and training and expertise that goes to dealing with these groups, you have less of that to deal with other serious threats,” he said.

Clarke reserved particular criticism for the strategy’s near-total reliance on force. Asked about the absence of any reference to American soft power — a bipartisan cornerstone of counterterrorism doctrine for a generation — Clarke said: “I have to believe it was somewhat deliberate.” He pointed to DOGE-driven cuts to USAID as having “pulled the mat out from under our soft power efforts, including in sub-Saharan Africa.”

His sharpest warning was about the document’s historical arc. The heavy emphasis on kinetic operations and the de-emphasis of prevention and diplomacy, Clarke said, repeats a failed playbook. “It becomes a game of Whac-A-Mole. We tried that for two decades. It didn’t work. In fact, it backfired spectacularly. And, unfortunately, this document seems to be heading back into that exact direction.”

The Charlie Kirk Reference

The strategy cites what it describes as the assassination of Charlie Kirk — identified in the document as a victim of political violence carried out by a radical espousing extreme transgender ideologies — as direct justification for treating violent left-wing extremism as a counterterrorism priority.

The strategy frames this event as evidence of a broader pattern of organized, ideologically motivated violence from the left that now warrants formal inclusion in the U.S. counterterrorism framework. Right-wing influencers and media outlets rapidly spread claims about the shooter’s gender identity and supposed “pro-transgender” ideology based on unverified assertions about the bullet casings used in the shooting.

The Ghost of COINTELPRO

The strategy’s use of the word “neutralization” in describing its domestic CT objectives draws a direct historical parallel that its critics are not missing. The language echoes the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, deployed in the 1960s and 1970s against the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters. A 1976 Senate Select Committee report found the program had “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.”

Critics note that when the language of “neutralization” moves from operational jargon into an official counterterrorism strategy document, the legal implications expand. As Jones observed, when such language appears in a national presidential security memo, in a report led by a task force at the U.S. Department of Justice, and in a counterterrorism document, “these are laying the legal framework for prosecution.”

Delegated Strike Authority and Civilian Casualties

The strategy’s expansion of domestic CT authority runs parallel to an equally significant structural shift in its overseas strike posture. On Day Eight of Trump’s second term, the document states, the president returned counterterrorism rules of engagement to those used in his first term, delegating much of that authority back down to Combatant Commanders rather than keeping it centralized at the White House as the Biden Administration required. The strategy credits that change with producing the first successful CT strike within three days — against a senior ISIS leader — and says U.S. forces have since “neutralized hundreds of Jihadist terrorists in multiple countries.”

The real-world consequences of that earlier delegation are already on record. A previous Trump-era loosening of CT strike authority contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives.

“They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

The 2026 strategy does not address that incident.

The Explicit Concern About Government Overreach — From the Same Document

What makes this strategy unusual is its simultaneous warning about the very powers it expands. The document quotes Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy directly: the “departments and agencies of the United States Government have been granted fearsome powers. Those powers must never be abused, whether under the guise of ‘deradicalization,’ ‘protecting our democracy,’ or any other pretext.”

The strategy states that “millions of Americans have lost confidence in the rectitude of the most powerful elements of our Federal government; the national security apparatus of the United States,” and attributes that loss of confidence to prior administrations using CT powers against political opponents.

It then expands those same powers in a new direction — against a category of “violent” extremists defined, in the document’s own language, by the ideologies they hold.

How the Framework Compares to Prior Doctrine

The Question the Document Doesn’t Answer

The strategy is direct about what prior administrations got wrong. It accuses the Biden Administration of having “weaponized the intelligence community against conservatives” and of pursuing policies that created what it calls a “borderless America.” The document frames the new left-wing extremism designation as a corrective — a return to politically neutral CT practice.

But the designation of domestic political movements as CT targets operates on a different legal and operational terrain than foreign terrorist groups. The strategy does not specify what legal authorities govern the “domestic mapping” and “membership identification” activities it calls for, nor what distinction it draws between a violent act carried out by someone with left-wing beliefs and a terrorist conspiracy organized along ideological lines. Critically, the document’s own definition of who qualifies as a “violent” left-wing extremist does not require violence: holding “anti-American,” “radically pro-transgender,” or anarchist views is, by the strategy’s terms, sufficient.

That line — between ideology and action — has historically defined where counterterrorism authority ends and domestic law enforcement, with its accompanying constitutional constraints, begins.

The 2026 strategy does not draw it.