Trump Did Not Designate Antifa Terrorists

In a post on President Trump’s personal twitter account, the president said that the United States would officially label Antifa as a terrorist organization.

The president made the claim on Twitter in an effort to cast blame for the violent protests that occurred in multiple cities over the weekend across the United States over the death of George Floyd.

Antifa, a group of people whose political ideology leans toward the left but does not align with the Democratic Party, are sometimes associated with those who in participate in more aggressive forms of protest, such as vandalism.

According to both current and former government officials, the president does not have the authority to label the group as a terrorist organization because they are protected by the First Amendment. Additionally, the group lacks leadership and does not have any defined roles or centralized structure, but is instead a loosely defined movement of people who share similar protesting strategies and techniques.

Furthermore, if Antifa were more clearly defined, the United States government lacks the authority to label them as terrorist organization because the United States lacks a domestic terrorism law. The federal government only has the authority to deem entities terrorists and impose sanctions on foreign groups.

The United States lack of authority to label Antifa as a terrorist organization makes President Trump’s tweet about such an action inaccurate.

In summary, while President Trump said the United States would designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, he lacks the authority to designate them as one due to legal protections offered by the First Amendment. President Trump’s claim to label Antifa as a terrorist organization is a statement that he has made and is not official U.S. policy. As a result, we have labeled the statement as “misleading”.