What is Antifa, the leftist movement Trump says he’s labelling ‘major terrorist organization’?

Counter-protesters, some carrying ANTIFA flags, stand beneath palm trees on the beach awaiting to confront demonstrators for a "Patriot March" demonstration on January 9, 2021, in San Diego, California. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

U.S. President Donald Trump will keep a promise he first made five years ago, as protests swept the country after the murder of George Floyd, if he follows through with his plan announced Wednesday to designate Antifa as a “major terrorist organization.”

But the mechanics of Trump’s plan are not exactly clear, and the administration has provided few details about how the designation would work. Antifa, which is short for anti-fascist, is more of a decentralized movement than a unified organization.

The name is loosely applied to factions of black-clad leftists or anarchists who show up at protests opposing the police or the government, but has also been used by several on the right, including Trump, as a sort of catch-all reference to any type of left-wing protest activity.

Unlike militant far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, Antifa has never had a leader, nor is there a hierarchy or a command structure.

And as a domestic movement, Antifa — unlike the US State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations, including Islamist groups and drug cartels that the Trump administration designated as terror groups this year — enjoys the protections of the First Amendment.

The term has roots in anti-fascist movements that opposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini during World War II and that opposed white supremacist or skinhead groups throughout Europe during the Cold War before moving to the US.

Use of the term has rapidly grown in popularity since Trump’s first inauguration, during which small pockets of left-wing agitators participated in instances of rioting and arson in Washington, DC. It exploded after leftist groups showed up to oppose the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. There, left-wing and right-wing groups faced off in a series of street brawls of the type that have become synonymous with the Antifa movement, and continued throughout Trump’s first term.

The groups have become associated with regions of the Pacific Northwest, including cities like Seattle and Portland. Members of hard-left protest groups often wear black clothing as well as masks to conceal their identity. At times they have attacked journalists and members of the public who have filmed them at public protests.

A spectrum of left-wing ideas

Groups are usually kept small, in part to prevent infiltration by law enforcement or opposing right-wing groups. Most of the cases of rioting and violence that took place in the summer of protests following Floyd’s murder in 2020 were blamed on Antifa, even though Trump’s then-FBI Director, Christopher Wray, described Antifa as an ideology and not an organization.

Their ideology represents a spectrum of left-wing politics, but usually falls outside the mainstream Democratic platform. Groups described as Antifa generally wish to see wealth distribution and eschew participation in mainstream electoral politics.

The generalization of Trump’s announcement that he would designate Antifa as a terror group raises fears that the president may be looking for a ploy to stifle any large-scale left-wing dissent in the wake of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk’s assassination, rather than looking to dismantle one specific group. The president this week also suggested that demonstrators from the activist group Code Pink who protested Trump during his visit to a Washington, DC, restaurant, should be charged with crimes.

And the president has also used the label “terrorist” as a pretext to justify the government taking drastic, violent actions — including the US military’s strikes against boats from Venezuela that the president has claimed were carrying members of Tren de Aragua, a drug cartel that he designated as a terror group earlier this year.