Following the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk two weeks ago, Donald Trump is not about to let a crisis go to waste. But much like the Bush generation after 9/11, he is about to come up against immovable laws of politics.

Witness his executive order to designate Antifa as a “Domestic Terror Group”.  This immediately runs into two problems. First: that there is no membership list for Antifa, a very loose constellation of hardcore far-Left activists, idle fans, and more non-denominational agitators.

Then, there is the fact that there is no force in law behind the designation of a “Domestic Terror Group”. The State Department keeps a long list of Foreign Terror Groups, which is covered by statute, and can freeze bank accounts and block visas. But it has never been prohibited for Americans to join an affiliated organisation, Indeed, that would be at odds with the spirit of the First Amendment. A few McCarthy-era statutes have tried to close this loop, but at the level of case law, these have been tested and found moribund by the courts.

In truth, banning Antifa is not so much a federal act backed up by the machinery of the law, as it is positioning: an attempt to squash down, delete, and otherwise suppress the great Leftist complex within American society. Under Joe Biden, FBI terminology for extremism was rewritten to be value-neutral. For instance, White Supremacy was folded into “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist” (REMVE), which could also include Black or Chicano supremacist groups. Other categories included Anti-Government/Anti-Authority Violent Extremist (AGAAVE), Animal Rights/Environmentalist Violent Extremist (AREVE), and Abortion-Related Violent Extremist (ARVE). This meant the bureaucracy could prioritise some criminal networks, and deprecate others, while remaining ostensibly aloof.

Specifically naming Antifa is like saying the same thing only louder to a particularly stupid child. It clarifies to his agencies who is to be put under the finger of suspicion and where resources should be deployed. And, by so doing, it also allows for suspicion to work both ways. It establishes a casus belli to go after the NGO networks, in totality. To build a directional arrow, and a bureaucratic narrative.

This is based on the premise that funding for Antifa-like groups trickles down. At the top of the pipeline, massive billion-dollar dispersers like The Ford Foundation, and the Soros Foundation, that Vice President JD Vance named in his closing remarks when hosting The Charlie Kirk Show. Then there are the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center which are often given donations by larger entities and in turn pass these on to smaller Leftist organising networks. Then, somewhere near the fraying ends of this pipeline, Antifa-adjacent people are believed to be getting cash.

Often their connections are loose; and perhaps the cash is minor: $10,000 here or there for “community engagement”. But by linking the agitators to Antifa — and the cash to the big NGOs near the top of the funnel — the Trump regime would hope to perform a kind of reverse-Rico. To begin to show that these organisations have been recklessly funding “domestic terror”.

As selective weapons go, this is a useful vector to target the Leftist blob en masse, while leaving his own funding network untouched. It is very unlikely, for instance, that the Koch brothers or the NRA, are accidentally giving cash to Antifa organisers.

Of course, the exact end point remains unclear. Much procedure, and a little law, will still need to coagulate around this single sheet of paper, but it fits with the Republican Party’s new style of politics. Increasingly, rather belatedly, Trump’s White House fights a total war strategy: targeting the deep structures of power, rather than the ephemera of the news cycle.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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