In a fiery declaration, President Donald Trump announced he is designating Antifa a terrorist organization. Some experts say he lacks the authority to do so and will struggle to enforce such a move—while others warn it could give him sweeping license to target groups or individuals he disfavors.

“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 on social media on Wednesday evening. “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!”

As many have noted, Antifa is not an organized group. It simply means “anti-fascist,” or “anti-fascism.”

But Trump has taken the step anyway. Here’s what some experts say.

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BBC News reports that some legal experts have called into question Trump’s legal authority to declare Antifa a terrorist organization.

“The existing rules do allow the government, specifically the State Department, to make a list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ which makes it a crime to give funds or other ‘material support’ to those groups.”

“But the key word here is ‘foreign,'” BBC notes, “and those experts we have spoken to pointed out that free speech rights under the US constitution’s first amendment would limit Trump’s ability to ban – or restrict funding for – domestic movements like antifa.”

Rumen Cholakov, an expert in US constitutional law at King’s College London, “told us that if the government were to use its powers against them in the US their actions would be ‘potentially susceptible to constitutional challenges’ in court for violating these rights.”

Professor David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, told BBC Verify, “Under the First Amendment, no one can be punished for joining a group or giving money to a group.”

Meanwhile, other experts have also weighed in.

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Attorney and MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski observed, “Since Antifa is now designed as a terrorist organization it will be interesting to see how they determine who is a member and how they prove it is an organization.”

Politico senior legal affairs correspondent Kyle Cheney noted, “Trump says he’s designating ‘antifa’ a terrorist group and launching a probe into finding of antifa activities. The FBI has long said antifa doesn’t really have a centralized structure or leadership.”

U.S. Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), an attorney, told CNN Wednesday night that “there is no Antifa organization.”

He added, “the point” is that Trump is “using the Charlie Kirk murder as a pretext to go after people that he disagrees with. He, on the very night of Kirk’s murder, you will remember, accused the left of committing the murder — when the murderer had not even been caught or identified. This is all a pretext, and it’s a shame, I think … that Charlie Kirk actually stood for free speech. And instead, they’re using his memory to attack free speech.”

Political scholar Dr. Michael Mackey issued this warning: “‘Antifa’ is an artifact of Russian information warfare and the Kremlin-sponsored MAGA cult. No such entity exists in American civil society. Trump is owned by Putin.”

Intelligence and foreign policy analyst Malcolm Nance, a terrorism expert, said, “You cannot designate an idea as a terrorist group.  There is no organization called ANTIFA. There is no leadership or funding path. There is no membership.”

“What he is doing is setting the stage to designate ANY American as a terrorist,” Nance alleged. “That’s Fascism.”

CBS News national security coordinating producer Jim LaPorta, an award-winning journalist, wrote: “It’s unclear how Pres. Trump could designate a group inside the U.S. as a domestic terrorist group. The U.S. does not have a federal crime of domestic terrorism. Additionally, it’s been understood that the Govt. would run into 1st and 4th Amendment issues.”

But those hurdles aside, experts are still issuing warnings.

Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), an expert on Russia, and creator and co-host of the Kremlin File podcast series, expressed concern.

“So Trump is designating Antifa as a terrorist organization,” she wrote. “Problem is he thinks all Democrats are this so called antifa. He is following Russia’s playbook step by step to crush opposition. Hope everyone wakes up.”

On Substack, Lautman expanded her warning.

She pointed to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s remarks on Monday, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Calling the “radical left” a “vast domestic terror movement,” Miller said: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

“It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” he vowed.

“Where have I heard this before?” Lautman said of Miller’s statement. “In Russia, where the Kremlin seizes upon every terrorist attack, bombing, protest, or act of violence (some of which they carry out in false flag operations) to justify new crackdowns, laws, and the systematic destruction of any semblance of independent opposition.”

Lautman continued her stark warning, writing, “what makes the current moment in America so perilous is how closely it now echoes this Soviet/Russian script, with the killing of Charlie Kirk already being transformed from an individual crime into the cornerstone of a supposed vast conspiracy of leftist violence — again, without evidence — a pretext for sweeping crackdowns that will not stop at violent actors but extend to protesters, grassroots organizers, and the infrastructure that sustains them.”

“Groups like Indivisible and MoveOn, platforms like ActBlue, that fund Democratic candidates,” she predicted, “will all be recast as pipelines of extremism, stripped of their democratic role.”

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Image via Reuters

Vice President JD Vance is under fire for joking about the U.S. Department of Defense’s deadly strikes on several boats the Trump administration insists were smuggling drugs headed for the United States, despite claims by their government to the contrary. Some have suggested the strikes might be illegal.

Democratic and Republican U.S. Senators and human rights groups have expressed concerns.

“Let us be clear — this may be an extrajudicial execution, which is murder,” Amnesty International’s Daphne Eviatar told NPR. “There is absolutely no legal justification for this military strike.”

But on Wednesday, the Vice President disregarded any concerns as he relayed a conversation with the Defense Secretary.

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“I was talking to Secretary Hegseth, and you know what he said? He said, ‘You know what, Mr. Vice President, we don’t see any of these drug boats coming into our country. They’ve completely stopped.'”

“And I said, ‘I know why. I would stop too. Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.'”

The Vice President insisted that the killings of suspected drug smugglers are what should happen when “we just have our actual government fighting for the interests of Americans and nobody else.”

He claimed by doing so, “we can make this country safer, we can protect your jobs, we can make sure you’ve got the best wages anywhere in the world, and we can stop this terrible poison from coming into our country.”

Critics blasted the Vice President.

Veteran journalist John Harwood took the opportunity to call the Vice President “depraved.”

WUWM radio’s Joy Powers commented, “The Vice President of the United States is joking about murdering innocent people. Should someone call his employer?”

“There are actual fishermen in that area of world worried the United States is going to idiotically kill them,” noted Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman.

“Get it? The joke is that we might kill some totally innocent people! Haha that’s funny, right?” said attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick in a sarcastic remark.

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“Literally bragging that there’s a real chance we’re murdering innocent people,” wrote film producer Franklin Leonard.

“Nothing like a joke about US potentially murdering innocent people. Ha ha,” remarked Ron Filipkowski, an attorney and editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch News.

“Vance has a law degree, he will not be able to escape responsibility for this,” wrote former Republican and past trial lawyer John Jackson, calling Vance’s remarks “Sickening.”

“He thinks it’s funny that we threaten poor fisherman in a third-world country. This will be an exhibit in a court one day,” Jackson added.

“When JD Vance brags about the U.S. blowing up alleged drug boats and says, ‘I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world,’ he’s really saying: ‘We’re so reckless and dishonest that fishermen should worry that the U.S. will murder them and then falsely accuse them of drug trafficking,'” commented Mark Jacob, an author and former Chicago Tribune editor.

“In addition to everything else that’s reprehensible about this ‘joke’ about ‘accidentally’ murdering poor fishermen, don’t forget that Trump made this same ‘joke’ as well, so JD is also debasing himself by mindlessly mimicking Trump’s degeneracy,” remarked The New Republic’s Greg Sargent.

Vance on Trump's strikes on boats: "I wouldn't go fishing right now in that area of the world." pic.twitter.com/YdXmvCkV2B

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2025

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Image via Reuters

A House Democratic lawmaker blasted the right’s narrative that extremist violence comes largely — or exclusively — from the left, a claim contradicted by evidence, including a Justice Department study recently scrubbed from its website. The motive and political ideology of the shooter remain largely unknown.

President Donald Trump has been leading the charge on the right in suggesting that left-wing violence is prevalent.

“For years,” Trump said in an address from the Oval Office the night of Charlie Kirk’s killing, “those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans, like Charlie, to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

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White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on Monday declared there is “a vast domestic terror movement,” CNBC reported, noting that he was specifically “speaking of left-wing political organizations.”

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Miller also said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday declared, “Yes, who killed Charlie [Kirk]? Left-wing radicals. And they will be held accountable.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz on Wednesday tore into House Republicans.

“I want to caution my colleagues on, you know, one-sided violence in this country,” the Florida Democrat began.

“We just heard that there were no riots on the right. We’re literally sitting in the building where there was a giant riot by supporters of the president, the right,” he said, referring to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which many have deemed an insurrection.

“We also heard that only leftists have said that Trump is a ‘Nazi.’ In 2016, the current Vice President of the United States said, ‘Trump is either a cynical a– or he’s America’s Hitler’.”

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Moskowitz lamented having to “say this garbage. But you want me to sit here and get painted with one brush—the whole left. No, no, there are extremes on the left, and there are extremes on the right. And we collectively should tackle that.”

“But to come here and just look at us and say, ‘we all support what’s going on in the extremes,’ is why we can’t solve anything in this building.”

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Miller’s “suggestion that a secret network of violent left-wing extremists was behind the killing” of Charlie Kirk, “stands in contrast to the evidence that law enforcement officials presented on Tuesday in Utah, where Kirk was fatally shot. There was no indication presented Tuesday that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was a member of a group or that he fell under the sway of a particular leader. The investigation is ongoing.”

On Monday, as The New York Times reported, President Trump, “who has downplayed violence from right-wing or other supporters, said that he would like to designate a range of groups, including the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists, known as ‘antifa,’ as domestic terrorists and bring racketeering cases against people funding protests.”

The Times added that “other officials, from Vice President JD Vance on down, made it clear on Monday that they believed that political violence was a liberal problem and not a conservative one,” and announced “that they would be cracking down on what they called leftist nongovernmental organizations, and that they would use every available lever of the federal government to do so.”

“We just heard that there were no riots on the right. We’re literally sitting in the building where there was a giant riot by supporters of the president, the right,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz said.pic.twitter.com/tWgJKMOo61

— David Badash (@davidbadash) September 17, 2025

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