What To Do About 3 Authoritarian Trump Admin Memos? Keep Protesting

President Donald Trump is obviously unhappy with the resistance from a broad and growing protest movement against much of his administration’s agenda. Which goes at least part of the way toward explaining why he and his allies have just passed an executive order, a national security presidential memo, and an attorney general’s order aimed squarely at suppressing the free speech of a very poorly defined host of millions of people in the United States.

First, on September 22, Trump issued the executive order “DESIGNATING ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” According to National Public Radio, while federal law does allow the State Department to designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” no “similar list or process exists for domestic groups.”

The fact that “antifa”—short for anti-fascism—is a political stance against the takeover of government by oligarchs and their servants, not a literal organization, clearly matters not at all to Trump given that he tried and failed to do the same thing in 2020 in the wake of the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests. Nor does the fact that there are anti-fascists across the political spectrum, since conservatives can also be anti-fascist … not just liberals and leftists.

Second, on September 25, Trump issued “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the seventh national security presidential memo of his current term.

My suggestion to people using their First Amendment rights? Keep it up! Once again, it’s a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” period in American history.

The difference between an executive order and a national security presidential memo is that while the former are edicts to federal agencies on how to interpret and carry out federal law that also can govern the operation of the executive branch, the latter have heretofore been more narrowly focused on national security and foreign and military policy issues. Problematically, though executive orders have to be published in the Federal Register, national security presidential memos can be classified and kept out of the public eye. Making it especially interesting that Trump published his latest such memo in the light of day.

NSPM-7, as it is commonly known (not to be confused with the NSPM-7 of Trump’s first term) can be looked at in many different ways, but I agree with other critics that call it a direct attack on the First Amendment. The document takes wild swings at anyone with “anti-fascist,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-American” beliefs as it attempts to draw lines between Charlie Kirk’s evidently ideologically confused assassin Tyler Robinson, the imaginary antifa-as-organization, and a wide array of individuals and nonprofit groups—then orders “National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices (collectively, ‘JTTFs’),” the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service to go get those supposed evildoers.

Possibly to give Trump’s executive order against “antifa” more legal standing (and probably to forestall any potential blocking action from the Supreme Court), NSPM-7 indicates that “the Attorney General may recommend that any group or entity whose members are engaged in activities meeting the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’ in 18 U.S.C. 2331(5) merits designation as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’” And then states that the “Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall designate domestic terrorism a national priority area and develop appropriate grant programs to allocate funding for law enforcement partners to detect, prevent, and protect against threats arising from this area.”

Third, the icing on this disturbing cake came on September 29, when Attorney General Pam Bondi issued her own memorandum “ENDING POLITICAL VIOLENCE AGAINST ICE”—which once again tries to connect another individual with muddled-to-nonexistent political motivations, in this case Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Dallas shooter Joshua Jahn, with protests against ICE in Chicago, Illinois and Portland, Oregon and tries to style it as some kind of grand “well-organized” and “well-funded” conspiracy. Rather than a bunch of grassroots activists who think it’s undemocratic to send heavily-armed, masked ICE agents into American cities to terrorize both documented and undocumented immigrants (plus a growing number of citizens) and sometimes follow that up with potentially illegal (and unequivocally reactionary) military occupations.

The AG’s memo then directs “the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the United States Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to immediately direct all necessary officers and agents to defend ICE facilities and personnel whenever and wherever they come under attack, including in Portland and Chicago.” And orders them “to suppress all unlawful rioting and arrest every person suspected of threatening or assaulting a federal law enforcement officer or interfering with federal law enforcement operations.”

It goes on with more related orders from there.

The upshot of all these Trump administration edicts is that the federal powers-that-be don’t like being called fascists. And they definitely don’t like anyone using constitutionally-protected rights of freedom of speech and assembly to protest in defense of several increasingly oppressed “out groups” and democracy in general. Any more than they enjoy journalists like my colleagues and I here at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism using our right to freedom of the press to report and comment on such political developments. As witnessed by the vicious ICE attack on three fellow reporters in New York City this week—demonstrating just how much the feds care about that at present.

My suggestion to people using their First Amendment rights? Keep it up! Once again, it’s a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” period in American history. A situation that Native Americans, immigrants, and Black, Latino/a, Asian, feminist, GLBT, and left-wing Americans have, tragically, all faced before. And have beaten back time and time again through concerted political activism of the type that is so exercising the federal government of today.

Whether you consider Trump and company to be authoritarians or literally fascists, our basic democratic rights are plainly under threat from this administration. If that doesn’t ring true to you, read through the three memos in question; fact check their many unsubstantiated assertions, propagandistic misuse of the English language, and highly questionable reinterpretations of longstanding legal and regulatory practices; and then see how you feel about it.

If you agree with the interpretation of commentators like me, look for individuals and organizations peacefully and nonviolently protesting government overreach and outright abuse of power and join them.

The free press, BINJ included, will continue to cover the ideas, opinions, and actions of the growing popular movement for civil liberties and basic justice until our political establishment arrives at some new and more democratic equilibrium.

This editorial was originally produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.