The Trump White House released a new US Counterterrorism Strategy on Wednesday that openly lays out the framework for a fascist police state. The 16-page document, unveiled under the direction of White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka and signed by Trump on Tuesday, identifies three central targets of the Trump administration’s counterterrorism apparatus: “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” The document then declares, “We can defeat every single one of these groups, but the threat is significant and pervasive.”
In other words, actual armed organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda are placed in the same category as those who oppose fascism and advance left-wing, socialist or anarchist political views. The document mentions “left-wing” terrorism, extremism, radicals or threats repeatedly, while making no reference to “right-wing” or fascist terrorism. The word “fascist” appears only in the term “anti-fascists,” that is, as a supposed threat to the state.
This is the language of political proscription. The document’s promise that “counterterrorism operations will be executed apolitically” is immediately contradicted by its own content, which defines “violent left-wing extremists” as one of the three principal threats facing the United States.
The political character of the document is underscored by the role of Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant and senior director for counterterrorism. Gorka, born in Britain to Hungarian parents, served in the British Territorial Army from 1990 to 1993 and later moved to Hungary, where he became involved in right-wing nationalist politics. In 2007, he helped found the New Democratic Coalition, a Hungarian nationalist party formed with former members of Jobbik, an openly antisemitic and neo-fascist organization.
Gorka is a member of the Historical Vitézi Rend, a reconstitution of the World War II-era Vitézi Rend, or Order of Heroes, established under Admiral Miklós Horthy, the antisemitic dictator of Hungary and ally of Hitler. Under Horthy, the Hungarian Communist Party was banned, political opponents were repressed and hundreds of thousands of Jews were delivered to the Nazis.
The US State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual continues to list the “Order of Heroes (Vitezi Rend)” among organizations under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany for purposes of immigration inadmissibility screening. In his first stint in the Trump administration, Gorka appeared at Trump’s January 20, 2017 inaugural ball wearing the uniform and medal associated with the Vitézi Rend. NBC News traveled to Hungary and reported that members of the organization were pleased by the display. “When he appeared on US television… with the medal of the Vitez Order… it made me really proud,” Vitézi Rend spokesman Andras Horvath said.
The counterterrorism document produced under such auspices is saturated with the language of far-right conspiracy and fascist repression. It declares: “Americans should be safe to live their lives without the fear of terror attacks, the threat of Jihadists, the flooding of our communities with deadly drugs at the hands of foreign narcoterrorists, or violent left-wing extremists who have adopted radical ideologies antithetical to the principles upon which our Republic was founded.”
It then goes further, pledging the use of the national security apparatus against political tendencies before any crime has been committed. “Our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the document states. It promises to “map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
This is a blueprint for preemptive political repression. It authorizes the state to “map” domestic political organizations, identify their members and “cripple” them on the basis of ideology. Its explicit references to “radically pro-transgender” politics repeat the framework of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, announced last September, which used the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk to justify a sweeping campaign of police repression against the left.
The document cites Kirk’s assassination as an example of “politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists,” claiming that the killer “espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”
There is no corresponding mention of the assassination of Minnesota Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who were gunned down in their home in June 2025. Nor is there mention of the attempted assassination of Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, who were shot repeatedly but survived. Federal prosecutors charged far-right Trump supporter and anti-abortion zealot Vance Boelter in connection with the attacks.
The purpose of the document is not to assess political violence objectively, but to designate the left, which is virtually anyone who opposes the Trump administration and its fascist agenda, as the “enemy within.”
The same method appears in its discussion of Europe. The document denounces NATO allies as “financial, logistical, and recruitment hubs for terrorists” and declares that “unfettered mass migration has been the transmission belt for terrorists.” In prose that would be at home in the pages of the Nazi weekly Der Stürmer, it warns that “hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals” and that “the more these alien cultures grow, and the longer current European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed.”
The language echoes Trump’s broader effort to present immigrants, socialists, anti-fascists, anti-genocide protesters, transgender people and opponents of Zionism as a single terrorist conspiracy.
The document also invokes the supposed “deepening alliance” between “the far-left and Islamists,” recycling the fascistic “Red-Green” smear used to criminalize opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Its target is not terrorism, but political opposition to imperialist war, Zionism and capitalist rule.
The historical parallels are unmistakable. When Hitler came to power in Germany, the first inmates of Dachau were not foreign terrorists, but communists, socialists, trade union militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime. The category of “left-wing extremism” was the ideological preparation for dictatorship.
The Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy must be understood in this historical and political context. It follows the infusion of vast sums into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security, including the roughly $170 billion allocated last year for immigration enforcement and detention infrastructure and the additional tens of billions now being prepared for the immigration police. The US government is not building this apparatus merely to deport immigrants. It is preparing a police-state infrastructure for use against the working class as a whole, regardless of citizenship status.
The same government claims there is no money for Medicaid, food stamps, public education, health care or social services, while funneling hundreds of billions into immigration police, military operations and war. The counterterrorism document’s fusion of domestic repression, anti-immigrant hysteria and global military violence points to the real trajectory of American capitalism: dictatorship at home and war abroad.
The response of the corporate media and the Democratic Party has been near-total silence. The major cable networks have not treated the document as a warning of dictatorship. Figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have said nothing of substance about its implications. This silence is not an oversight. The Democrats and the corporate press do not want to alert the working class to the danger, because they support and defend the same national security apparatus now being turned ever more openly against political opposition and the population as a whole.
The fight against fascism cannot be waged through appeals to the Democratic Party, the courts or any agency of the capitalist state. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class against both parties and the military-intelligence apparatus they defend. The greatest source of terror in the world is not immigrant workers, anti-fascists, socialists or opponents of genocide. It is the US government itself, which has waged illegal wars, backed the genocide in Gaza, killed hundreds of fishermen in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and now seeks to use the same violent and illegal methods against workers and their families in the US.