Around mid-May (2026), shortly after I had written my article questioning whether Trump might conduct a counterterrorism campaign in the Sahel and West Africa,(1) two significant events occurred which give clues to what Trump might have in mind on that question. The first was the publication of the White House’s Counterterrorism Strategy memorandum for 2026,(2) The second, which occurred a day or two later, was the US military’s participation in a counterterrorist strike in Nigeria.

Trump’s memorandum was released on or around 10 May, meaning that the White House was obviously cognisant of the attacks by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) on the Mali junta on 25 April.(3) Indeed, the document refers specifically to a resurgent terror threat by Al Qaeda and IS in West Africa and the Sahel region.

The memorandum is disconcerting, almost certainly being the most exaggerated and misleading directive ever issued by an American President. Drafted by Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism – a position which does not require Congressional approval or confirmation – the 16-page document was described by The Intercept as “a collection of threats, grievances, hyperbole and lies, … a distillation of Trumpism as an ideology, movement, and system of governance,” which “serves as a new declaration of war on the Trump administration’s enemies – foreign and domestic, real and imagined.”(4)

A glance at Gorka’s résumé would suggest that he is wholly unqualified for the position of ‘counterterrorism czar’, as it is known.(5) Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, voiced his reservations about Gorka influencing policy in the White House, saying: “Gorka does not have much of a reputation in serious academic or policymaking circles. He has never published any scholarship of significance, and his views on Islam and U.S. national security are extreme even by Washington standards. His only real ‘qualification’ was his prior association with Breitbart News, which would be a demerit in any other administration.”(6)

Despite these shortcomings, Trump’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy is a “foundational document.” (7) It shifts national security priorities away from the traditional post-9/11 focus on global jihadist networks and instead redefines the primary threats around:

• Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.
• Violent Left-Wing Domestic Extremists, specifically anarchists and ‘Antifa’.
• Legacy Islamist Terrorists and Global Jihadists.

Trump’s ‘Counterterrorism Strategy’ would suggest that his primary concerns are with so-called ‘narco-terrorism’ and ‘Antifa’, both of which present him with serious legal difficulties, rather than ‘Legacy Terrorists’, such as Al Qaeda and IS groups.

As the first three chapters of my forthcoming book – War in the Sahel (8) – reveal in detail, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and its Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) failed, despite going to extreme and often ‘illegal’ lengths, to prove their assertion that drug traffickers, notably the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda, were linked and effectively one and the same thing. Nevertheless, despite Ginger Thompson’s (9) demonstration of the lack of evidence of a link between narcoterrorism and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, the concept of ‘narcoterrorism’ has persisted. Indeed, in the case of West Africa and the Sahel, where the Trump administration is re-engaging, neither JNIM nor L’État islamique dans le Grand Sahara (EIGS), now calling itself Islamic State – Sahel Province (ISSP), receive any money from drug trafficking, despite drug trafficking having a long history in the region. In his attempt to get around this problematic, Trump has defined drug traffickers, or ‘narcoterrorists’ as he calls them, as Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTOs). Whether this will give him some degree of legal cover for killing close to 200 civilians in attacks on alleged drug boats traversing Caribbean and eastern Pacific waters, despite failing to produce any evidence, is debatable.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has used his position, seemingly unconstitutionally on many occasions, to seek revenge on his enemies, real or imagined. This includes those who are opposed to or disagree with his views and polices and who are being accused of belonging to his ever-widening, ‘catch-all’ usage of the term ‘Antifa’, an abbreviation of ‘antifascist’. (9)

However, as with the concept of ‘narco-terrorism’, Trump also has a legal problem in designating ‘Antifa’ as a terrorist organisation. In 2020, during protests after the police killing of George Floyd, Trump tweeted: “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” Trump did not follow through on this at the time, possibly because the then FBI Director Christopher Wray said that Antifa was “not a group or an organisation”, but a “movement or an ideology”. (11)(12)

On his return to the White House, Trump set about designating Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organisation” by issuing a presidential memorandum entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” (NSPM-7) on 25 September 2025. (13) Following the memorandum’s issuance and Trump’s designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, (14) Federal prosecutors set about securing terrorism convictions against protesters allegedly linked to Antifa. While the US government can designate a group as a Foreign Terror Organization (FTO), the legal criteria state that the targeted group “must be a foreign organization”. Congress has not passed any law relating to domestic terrorism designation, nor is there a standalone crime of ‘domestic terrorism’. American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch condemned the directive, arguing it could be used to target political opponents and suppress dissent, as has been the case. The Brennen Center for Justice concluded that both the memorandum and the related antifa designation were “ungrounded in fact and law”. (16)

In preparing the ground for his May 2026 attack on Antifa, Trump published another Presidential Memorandum in January 2026 announcing the US’ withdrawal from 66 international organisations and entities, many of which were central to the multilateral security landscape the US had helped construct. The new – May 2026 – counter-terrorism strategy logically continues this approach: not just in withdrawing from institutions but in repudiating the very ideas that informed their creation. (17)

Trump’s May 2026 memorandum says: “Our counterterrorism operations will be executed apolitically and founded upon reality-based threat assessments. Our counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us. We will not permit the weaponization of America’s unparalleled CT capabilities for partisan purposes and in contravention of every American’s God-given rights.”

This statement is not only a falsity in that his new memorandum is already being used ‘politically’ to target those who ‘disagree with him’, but contains a perverse irony in that the Trump administration is following the road taken by many of the world’s authoritarian regimes since President George W. Bush launched America’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) in the wake of 9/11. Since then, authoritarian regimes the world over have used the pretext of the GWOT to designate their domestic enemies and opponents as ‘terrorists’. Trump, by following in the footsteps of Algeria, Russia, Turkey, Mali and other authoritarian regimes, is now bringing the war on terror home by using it, albeit without legal foundation, to target Americans themselves. The May 2026 presidential memorandum, described by The Hague-based International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) as “selective amnesia”, (17) attempts to put antifa, which is a collection of ideas and not an organisation, on a par with actual terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State groups.

Not only have Americans already been successfully prosecuted under Trump’s executive order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organisation, with the Justice Department insisting there will be more,(18) but the partisan intentions of the May 2026 directive are blatantly obvious in that the directive makes no reference to right-wing violence. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said: “Absurdly, the document incorrectly labels drug cartels, ‘legacy Islamist terrorists,’ and violent left-wing extremists as the top counterterrorism threats – despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades.(19) A 2025 analysis conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that, over the past decade, right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing militants. Islamist jihadist-inspired attacks resulted in 82 deaths over the same span.”(20) Moreover, The US Department of Justice (DoJ) removed a study into political violence in America which concluded that far-right extremism outpaced “all other types of violent extremism”.(21) BBC Verify has reviewed five independent studies that have looked into politically motivated attacks in the US going back decades, all of which suggest there have been more cases of political violence in the US committed by people assigned a right-wing ideology by researchers than a left-wing one. (22) Brian Finucane, a senior advisor for the US Program at the International Crisis Group said the Trump administration had “repurposed ‘terrorism’ framing and applied it to new boogeymen, like alleged narcos as well as a caricature of their domestic political opposition.”(23)

On his press tour touting the new strategy, Gorka said: “left-wing violent radicals like Antifa and the anarchists” were the “most ascendant” terror group and – without evidence – claimed they were “the people who killed our friend Charlie Kirk.” He said these leftists are “People who think that if you don’t agree with them politically, they get to kill you.”(24)

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Via https://propagandainfocus.com/the-us-president-turns-the-global-war-on-terror-against-us-citizens/