On September 25, President Donald Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7): “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM-7 is a fascist blueprint for mobilizing the entire repressive apparatus of the American state—the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), State Department, Treasury, and the military—against all political opposition on the left.
The memorandum begins with the killing of Charlie Kirk and asserts that “individuals who adhered to the alleged shooter’s ideology embraced and cheered this evil murder while actively encouraging more political violence.”
More than two weeks after Kirk’s killing, no evidence has emerged that the shooter had a definite political ideology, or that he was part of an organized group, left or right-wing. There is no evidence he planned the assassination with anyone else and there have been no other arrests connected to the shooting.
In order to manufacture the image of a unified, centrally directed left-wing terror network, NSPM-7 strings together entirely unrelated incidents—protests against police, opposition to ICE, the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and assassination attempts on Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—and presents them as parts of a single conspiracy. This deliberate conflation creates the mirage of a vast, organized movement of “domestic terrorism” on the left, even though no evidence has emerged connecting these events.
Unsurprisingly, the memorandum is silent on right-wing political violence. It does not mention the January 6 coup attempt, when Trump, with the backing of fascist militias, the Republican Party, large sections of the police-military-intelligence apparatus and elements of the Supreme Court sought to overturn the 2020 election and establish a presidential dictatorship. It ignores the long trail of murders and attacks carried out by racists, religious zealots and neo-Nazis over decades, including the recent murder of Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark.
It says nothing of the constant incitement to violence from Trump himself and his political allies, including instances of Trump and his allies joking about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi or calling for the deportation of Democratic politicians such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Zohran Mamdani. There is not a word on the Republican embrace of Great Replacement theory rhetoric which has animated mass shootings in the US and internationally for over decade.
This selective accounting is not an oversight. The greatest purveyor of political violence in the world and the greatest threat to the democratic rights of everyone, inside and outside the United States, is the US government itself, led by Trump, but supported by both the Democrats and Republicans.
Yet NSPM-7 presents “anti-fascism” and left-wing opposition to genocide, forced disappearances and police violence as the terrorist menace.
Terrified of growing support for socialism in the US and internationally, NSPM-7 frets that “anti-fascism” movements, “portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.”
The claim in NSPM-7 that “foundational American principles” include “support for law enforcement and border control” is historically absurd. Americans did not take up arms in the Revolution of 1776 because of their love of police or their defense of border guards. Modern policing in the United States did not even exist at the time of the revolution. The earliest municipal police departments emerged only in the 1830s and 1840s, and they were designed above all to discipline the working class and enforce slavery. Border enforcement, likewise, only became institutionalized with the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924—in the midst of a wave of xenophobic and racist immigration restrictions.
By retroactively treating the coercive apparatus of the capitalist state—the police, ICE, border control—as “foundational,” Trump’s memorandum rewrites history to equate “America” with its modern machinery of repression. In Trump’s fascist framework, opposing police brutality or the persecution of immigrants is equated with terrorism.
The memorandum continues:
Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
This sweeping definition paints a target on anyone who rejects the official ideology of Trump and the Republican right. Those who oppose capitalism, challenge nationalism, defend immigrants, expose racism or fight for gender equality are to be placed in the same category as terrorism.
By treating political beliefs as the “animating threads” of terrorism, NSPM-7 provides a pseudo-legal justification for the persecution of individuals and organizations on the basis of their political convictions. It is a direct attack on the First Amendment.
The memo orders all 56 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) to “develop and implement a comprehensive national strategy” to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt individuals and organizations allegedly engaged in “political violence.” Its scope is expansive: it explicitly includes “funders, officers, employees of organizations, US citizens abroad, and NGOs with close ties to foreign governments.”
The Treasury is directed to track and disrupt financial networks, while the attorney general is ordered to prosecute all cases “to the maximum extent permissible by law,” and to classify activities like “doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, civil disorder” as forms of terrorism.
ICE, which is presently kidnapping and deporting immigrants—including US citizens—is positioned in the memorandum as a primary victim of supposed left-wing violence. As of this writing, not a single ICE officer has been killed on the job, period. This sleight of hand turns reality on its head: the same agency terrorizing working class immigrants is presented as under siege, justifying more repression.
The White House released an accompanying “Fact Sheet” elevating “attacks on ICE officers” and the harassment of billionaires as existential threats, while erasing the January 6 coup and decades of fascist terror. The omissions are deliberate. As with the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933, the aim is to transform isolated incidents into a pretext for the destruction of democratic rights and the persecution of left-wing opposition.
NSPM-7 follows directly from Trump’s September 23 Executive Order designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” As the World Socialist Web Site explained:
The Trump White House has now taken the unprecedented step of branding “Antifa”… as a domestic terrorist organization. The order has no basis in law, but it provides the pseudo-legal framework for targeting left-wing political opposition.
Together, the EO and NSPM-7 amount to a declaration of war on anti-fascist opposition. They criminalize dissent, invert the reality of political violence in America, and unleash the state against the left while covering for the fascist forces nurtured by Trump himself.
At the September 25 press conference announcing NSPM-7, Trump and his aides dispensed with any pretense of neutrality.
Trump himself declared:
We’re looking at the funders of a lot of these groups… These aren’t your protesters that make the sign in their basement late in the evening because they really believe it. These are anarchists and agitators, professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired by wealthy people, some of whom I know.
This language openly revives the McCarthyite trope of a shadowy “outside agitator” bankrolling protest. Stephen Miller called the day “historic,” claiming:
This is the first time in American history that there is an all of government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism, to dismantle Antifa… This is part of an organized campaign of radical left terrorism. It is structured. It is sophisticated. It is well funded. It is well planned. There is really no parallel like this… There is an entire system of feeder organizations that provide money, resources, weapons.
FBI director Kash Patel reinforced the same narrative, vowing to “chase them down like the domestic terrorists that they are,” while Attorney General Pam Bondi bragged that “President Trump has taken the handcuffs off law enforcement” and JD Vance supplied lurid anecdotes about “paid people in black ski masks” in Oregon. Trump capped the event by floating familiar names—George Soros and LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman—as potential funders of this supposed “terrorism.”
As of this writing, not a single leading Democrat, including Senator Chuck Schumer, Senator Bernie Sanders, former President Barack Obama, Representative Hakeem Jeffries or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has posted a word on social media opposing NSPM-7. Their silence is not incidental. It reflects the Democratic Party’s longstanding collaboration with Trump on the central pillars of his authoritarian program, above all, immigration enforcement and the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state.
In January, a majority of House Democrats joined Republicans in passing the reactionary Laken Riley Act, which mandates the detention and deportation of immigrants on the basis of mere accusations. In March, Schumer personally delivered the key votes in the Senate to secure passage of a government funding package that kept the deportation machine fully operational, even as Trump escalated his mass roundups. Far from constituting an opposition, the Democrats’ record shows them as enablers of Trump’s fascistic agenda, ensuring that the state remains armed against the working class while political dissent is criminalized.
The lesson of NSPM-7, and of the Democrats’ silence in the face of Trump’s latest fascist directive, is that the defense of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party. This is the very party that paved the way for Trump’s return to power through its own war policies, its defense of Wall Street, its slanders against anti-genocide protesters and its refusal to mobilize against the far right.
The fight against dictatorship and repression requires a complete political break with both capitalist parties. It demands the independent mobilization of the working class—the only social force with the power to shut down production, end war, and dismantle the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. Only through the conscious, international organization of the working class can state violence be ended and the democratic rights of all be secured.