The State’s War on the Left Didn’t Begin With Trump — But He’s Escalating It

The Trump administration’s drive to turn the machinery of counterterrorism against left-wing movements worldwide kicked into a higher gear this month surrounding its convening of an international “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.”

On July 16, 2026, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau stood before representatives of over 60 nations assembled for the global summit in Washington, D.C. to introduce his boss, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As he opened for the arch neoconservative, Landau told those assembled, “For those of us who grew up in the 1970s, the topic that we’re going to be discussing today is all too familiar.”

Landau’s invocation of the 1970s felt like an implicit admission that to many, the topic of the day — “left-wing political violence” — felt like an anachronism. While groups like the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy in the 1970s did carry out acts of violence while proclaiming revolutionary beliefs, such groups are long defunct. Yet according to Rubio and White House adviser Stephen Miller, left-wing political violence constitutes an immediate threat; they describe the West as being in a war for civilization itself. Such rhetoric is not new for Miller.

The conference is the latest step in the Trump administration’s efforts to use mechanisms originally framed through the language of “counterterrorism” to repress left-wing movements — efforts the administration is now internationalizing. Donald Trump’s opening move was an executive order in September 2025 declaring that antifa, short for anti-fascism, was a domestic terrorism organization. Anti-fascism is an ideology, not an organization, though the bizarrely worded order dubbed antifa “a militarist, anarchist enterprise.” In addition to antifa not being an organization, there is no mechanism in U.S. law to declare a domestic organization to be domestic terrorists. These peculiarities left questions as to whether the move was mere bluster, a bit of rhetorical red meat for Trump’s MAGA base, or the start of something more serious.

That question was answered three days later when Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7). Citing the threat of left-wing political violence, NSPM-7 is essentially a blueprint for mobilizing the U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy against domestic left-wing movements. It shows a deep understanding of the machinery of repression and an ability to turn it against Trump’s domestic enemies without requiring any new laws.

Rubio, along with Miller, explicitly mentioned NSPM-7 during the July 16 ministerial. In addition to NSPM-7, the Trump administration produced a counterterrorism strategy document that names three terror threats to the U.S.: “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” Rubio told the assembled nations that, “Under President Trump, for the first time, the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror.”

While the Trump administration has made waging a civilizational war against the left under the guise of counterterrorism a key goal, Rubio has increasingly transformed the State Department into a tool for political repression. Early in the Trump administration, Rubio invoked a rarely used Cold War immigration provision to arrest, detain, and attempt to deport Palestinian solidarity activists. Citing NSPM-7, Rubio is now using the same immigration provision to deny visas to so-called “far left terrorists and associated groups.”

Rubio’s State Department has again shown itself to be an important vector of McCarthyism with its July 20 report entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” Rubio, whose family fled the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (the dictator who was later overthrown by Fidel Castro), has long been obsessed with overthrowing Cuba’s socialist government.

The State Department report claims that the tiny island nation, under decades of U.S. siege, constitutes a threat to the U.S. in terms of “espionage” and “subversion.” This is clearly building a pretext, albeit a preposterous one, for a regime change war against Cuba. But it also is designed to put a target on the backs of the U.S. left.

Claims of Cuba’s threat to the U.S. largely stem from the idea that Cuba supports or inspired decades of left-wing movements in the U.S. The State Department report draws on sources like the House Un-American Activities Committee and the right-wing Capital Research Center, parroting decades-old conspiracy theories about U.S. social movements being the products of foreign communists.

Like the Rubio-Miller summit on left-wing violence, the report feels at first glance like the product of a past era. But its list of “front groups and fellow travelers” includes the Democratic Socialists of America, Code Pink, and The People’s Forum – all current targets of the right.

Days before the report was released, Rubio told the ministerial, “The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.” It is clear claims of Cuban support are pivotal for laying the groundwork for attacking the left.

And the tools that the Trump administration needs to repress the left are already available within the U.S. national security state.

The U.S. Has a Long History of Targeting the Left

Trump officials repeatedly claim that prior to this point, the supposed threat of the left had been ignored or downplayed. This narrative is false. Domestic political surveillance, especially when carried out by the FBI, has always disproportionately targeted the left. And much of the language employed by Trump about left-wing “terrorists” has been in consistent usage for decades by the FBI.

Since counterterrorism (as opposed to counter-subversion) became the FBI’s national security focus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the FBI has repeatedly targeted nonviolent left-wing groups as “terrorists.”

Under the Reagan administration, the FBI carried out a massive, sprawling investigation against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which was justified as being an effort in collecting foreign intelligence against international terrorists.

During the Clinton administration, FBI Director Louis Freeh gave testimony to the U.S. Senate on the “Threat of Terrorism to the United States” that featured a section on “Left-wing and Puerto Rican extremist groups.” Claiming socialist, “anarchist and extremist socialist groups” posed a threat, he singled out groups involved in anti-globalization protests he claimed had an “an international presence.”

When George W. Bush’s administration expanded the scope of counterterrorism surveillance, the FBI issued bulletins encouraging preemptive monitoring of anti-Iraq War and anti-globalization protesters in the name of counterterrorism.

The Biden administration, like the Trump administration, claimed to be uniquely focused on domestic terrorism, and produced documents that repeated decades-old descriptions of “anarchist violent extremists, who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which they perceive as harmful to society” as being a terror threat. Thus, the Trump administration’s claims that the national security apparatus spared the left in the past are simply false.

Rhetoric about left-wing or anarchist extremists did not start with Trump. The Trump administration’s war on the left, however, should not be shrugged off as more of the same. One striking difference is that in the past when the FBI used language about anarchist or left-wing terrorism, it was often coupled with parallel language about the sovereign citizen movement, militias, or right-wing terrorists. The FBI’s own track record indicates the agency was hardly even-handed, but it at least feigned neutrality.

The Trump administration has not only omitted such language but also made clear that the FBI’s focus must exclusively be on the left, not the right. In doing so, the administration has blended together the language of the “war on terror” with that of Cold War McCarthyism. But there is greater continuity between these two periods than many realize.

The U.S. has a long history of political policing. By the end of World War I, this political policing had increasingly become federalized. The Bureau of Investigation, as the FBI was known then, formed an intelligence division dedicated to tracking down so-called radicals. This division was disbanded when its political spying aroused considerable controversy, but paradoxically, in spite of the scandal, it helped to catapult the division’s leader, J. Edgar Hoover, into national political life. Even as the division was temporarily shuttered, Hoover was promoted to run the entire Bureau.

In the run-up to World War II, Hoover was able to again restart the FBI’s intelligence division. As he edged out bureaucratic competitors to firmly establish domestic intelligence as a core part of the FBI’s fiefdom, he interpreted presidential directives to give the FBI’s reconstituted intelligence division broad power to investigate “subversives.”

Unsurprisingly, Hoover’s FBI overwhelmingly used this power to spy on the left. The Cold War allowed the FBI to cement these powers, but much of what would later be described as McCarthyism was the deliberate result of the FBI leadership’s own preexisting goals. Fallout from Watergate, the discrediting of the Cold War national security establishment by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and revelations that the FBI had spied on the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements that millions of Americans participated in all led to a serious effort to rein in this spying.

Yet, almost as soon as reforms were being proposed in the mid 1970s, defenders of the McCarthyite project desperately turned to a new rationale: counterterrorism.

Claims were made by congressional critics of FBI reform, right-wing think tanks, and private McCarthyites that restrictions on FBI surveillance, or even the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, would lead the U.S. to become defenseless against terrorism.

The McCarthyites-turned-counterterrorists rallied around a theory that since terrorism was a politically motivated crime, preventing terrorism required looking at political movements before they spawned terrorists. Unsurprisingly, they singled out left-wing movements they disliked as those mandating the most scrutiny.

Critics on the right of the new restrictions argued that guidelines that restricted the FBI to surveilling only those engaged in criminal acts robbed it of the ability to prevent terrorism. These grievances percolated on the right for decades.

After al-Qaeda’s horrific murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, these grievances became the starting point for the effort to hijack the tragedy and expand counterterrorism surveillance. Using intelligence to prevent and disrupt terrorism before it occurred, as opposed to prosecuting it as a law enforcement matter after the fact, became the new focus of the FBI. To be clear, preventing violent acts like 9/11 is a noble goal. But the preventive framework for counterterrorism that was adopted opened the door to political policing, as it was arguably designed to, and has seemingly had little success in foiling real violence. And NSMP-7 is rife with references to this framework. This is what makes it so dangerous.

The Trump counterterrorism strategy is bringing history full circle, fully exposing the McCarthyite origins of modern counterterrorism. The Rubio-Miller conference may seem like a comical anachronism. But the administration appears to be building toward painting larger swathes of the left as terrorists or foreign agents, while claiming the need to prevent terrorism. In doing so, Trump officials are laying the framework for targeting the left broadly.