President Donald Trump announced in a social media post on Wednesday night that he is "designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION." He made the same declaration in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter protests against the police killing of George Floyd, with no real effect on the ground.
But Trump's new declaration came with another, more specific order: "I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices." And that may be the real significance of his decision.
There is no such thing as a domestic terrorist organization list in the United States. When Congress debated the first counterterrorism legislation in the 1990s, the Clinton administration and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) pushed for sweeping domestic police powers. It was Republicans who opposed those measures at the time because they worried that counterterrorism would be weaponized against the right.
