President Donald Trump says he is designating antifa as a major terrorist organization, per his Wednesday night Truth Social post.
“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,“ he wrote. ”I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump has not yet specified when he plans on making the designation official or what legal weight it will carry.
This is the second time Trump has suggested he would take this action on antifa, which stands for anti-fascists. In 2020, following the George Floyd riots, Trump tweeted, “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
The FBI defines domestic terrorism as “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial or environmental nature.”
Antifa is receiving higher public scrutiny following conservative influencer Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University last week. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said Kirk’s suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, engraved his bullets with several phrases linked to anti-fascist ideology. One contained the lyrics to “Bella Ciao,” an Antifa-linked song, and another said, “Hey fascist! Catch!”
Antifa was also linked by law enforcement to some of the suspects in an ambush attack on the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas on July 4. At least ten attackers fired on agents at the facility, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
What is antifa?
Andy Ngo, a journalist for The Post Millennial and author of “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy,” described antifa as a group of “organized networks,” on Newsmax, Thursday.
While antifa says it is opposed to “Neo-Nazis,” “Neo-fascism,” white supremacists and racism, PBS described antifa as “far-left-leaning movements.”
Douglas Murray, a writer at The Spectator and an author of several books, has also done extensive research into antifa as an organization.
In October 2020, Murray flew to Portland, Oregon, to spend a week up close with antifa to see what they were up to in the area.
“For years, the city has seen regular rioting by the far-left group ‘Antifa.’ In the name of pursuing non-existent fascists these activists laid waste to their city, dragged passing motorists from their cars, hospitalized journalists whose reporting was disobliging and otherwise turned the city into a first-world slum,” Murray wrote.
Douglas referenced Ngo’s attack by members of Rose City antifa that same month. Ngo was attacked again in 2021 and has since received “dozens” of death threats.
“They stole my equipment and in the process punched me several times on my face and head and kicked me, where I fell partially to the ground,” he told Newsmax, Thursday. Some of his attackers wore gloves with “hardened materials in the knuckles” to make each punch “hit like a brick.”
Ngo was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where he discovered he had a brain bleed.
“I nearly died from that, and I spent six months with various types of cognitive and physical therapies because of the brain injury,” he said.
Why is Trump trying to ban antifa?
Trump’s opposition to antifa is not new.
On the morning of his inauguration in 2017, “a large group of anti-Trump protesters, dressed in black, roamed through the city (Washington D.C.) for close to an hour,” The New Yorker said. These “anti-fascist” protesters “smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police,” CNN reported.
Later that summer in 2017, a petition with over 160,000 signatures was sent to The White House, “urging the Trump administration to label the left-wing antifa a ‘terror group,’” Fox News reported.
The petition writer added that antifa had “earned this title due to its violent actions in multiple cities and their influence in the killings of multiple police officers throughout the United States.”
Is antifa organized or not?
Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” believes antifa is a “coalition politics of all kinds of radicals,” but it is not an organized group. Others, including Ngo, disagree.
Bray compares antifa to feminism, defining it as an ideology. “There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group,” he told The Washington Post.
However, smaller antifa groups do appear to get direction from larger organizations.
Antifa International connects people with their local antifa groups. Their site says, “In a lot of ways, antifa are more organized than ever before, and we’re seeing cross-border collaboration with projects like this.”
Antifa International’s most recent Substack post is titled, “September 2025: Antifa Action of the Month — Start ‘Em Young!”
It begins, “One of the most common questions we’ve received as an antifascist social media collective over the years has been ‘Am I too young to be antifa?’”
“The truth is, pretty much everyone in our collective started doing antifascist work when we were teenagers, and this is the case for most antifascists that we know as well!” they write.
They continue, “If you’re old enough to start putting together your own sociopolitical opinions, you’re old enough for those opinions to be in opposition to fascism.”
There are private antifa groups that require special admission and administrative checks. Rose City Antifa, for example, states it is “a group closed to members only.” If someone wants to be a part of their organization, leadership asks for “an email with a little bit of information about you and what makes you interested in joining.”
Who is funding antifa?
In Trump’s Truth Social announcement, Thursday night, he pledged that “those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.”