Brad Reed || The Trump administration on Wednesday released an official counterterrorism strategy that puts “anti-fascist” organizations on par with terrorist organizations such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
In outlining its strategy, the document argues that the US faces three “major type” of terrorist threats: “Legacy Islamiast Terrorists,” such as al-Qaeda and ISIS; “Narcoterrorists” that sell illegal drugs; and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”
When it comes to the purported domestic left-wing threats, the document says the administration will “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
“We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home,” the document adds, “identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
The document makes no mention of the threat posed by members of right-wing groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, many of whom received pardons from President Donald Trump in 2025 for their role in violently storming the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
A report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, while left-wing political violence has grown since Trump’s first election in 2016, it “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”
Journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on Wednesday that the strategy “is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration.”
Digging into the details of the document, Klippenstein said it was essentially a strategy for prosecuting “pre-crime,” which he noted “aims to build cases against people for what they might do, most ominously based on speech or beliefs.”
At the end of his analysis, Klippenstein warned that the document makes clear “the global War on Terror has come home.”
The counterterrorism strategy document builds on the framework established by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by Trump in September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Rights groups have for months been sounding the alarm about the implications of NSPM-7, which they said could be used to initiative a widespread crackdown against the Trump administration’s critics.
Typo-riddled mess of terror report gets Trump hammered by critics: ‘Written by an intern’
Alexander Willis || Critics hounded the Trump administration on Friday after the White House released its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy report earlier that morning, which onlookers immediately noticed was riddled with typos and grammatical errors.
“This entire document looks like something written by an intern,” wrote author and foreign policy analyst Kabir Taneja on Friday in a social media post on X.
The document, which includes a lengthy foreword written by President Donald Trump attacking the “weakness” of the Biden administration, includes countless typos: the word “capability” is misspelled as “capbility,” the word “specific” is misspelled as “specifc,” and “school board” is merged into a single word as “schoolboard.”
The document also contains sentences that appear to have words missing. One sentence reads “counterterrorism is a core part the national security mission,” which appears to be missing the word “of.”
“This was once a serious document written by serious people in both Dem and GOP Admins,” noted Juliette Kayyem, a senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and former government official. “Now it reads like a partisan screed, lacking data or analysis or discussion of capabilities or relative threats, filled with typos, and mocks the American public’s intelligence.”
Beyond the grammatical errors, critics also took note of what some characterized as the Trump administration’s partisan view of counterterrorism.
Perhaps most notably, the report names “violent left-wing extremists” as among the top three “major types of terror groups,” and omits right-wing extremists, despite right-wing extremists being responsible for “all extremist-related murders in 2024,” the third year in a row in which right-wing extremists had been “connected to all identified extremist-related killings,” per reporting from the Anti-Defamation League.
The document also lists “radically pro-transgender” groups as among the Trump administration’s key targets in its 2026 counterterrorism strategy.
“Hard to put into words how garbage this ‘strategy’ truly is,” wrote journalist and cybersecurity analyst Jackie Singh in a social media post on X.
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