Trump's Counterterrorism Strategy Explicitly Targets the Left

The so-called War on Terror was always going to become a weapon for widespread domestic political repression. Now it’s official.

Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office on March 31, 2026. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Any Rage Against The Machine fan reading the Trump administration’s new national security strategy immediately recognized the parallel to COINTELPRO, the FBI’s infamous Cold War campaign to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt the American left.

After elevating “violent left-wing extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” to a central focus of U.S. counterterrorism, the strategy document, released last week, declared: “The mission of the counterterrorism structures of the U.S. Government is to identify those groups that have the intent and capability to plot attacks against Americans and then neutralize them.”

Whether consciously or not, that mission statement is ominously similar to perhaps the most prominent of all COINTELPRO memos. In March 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the bureau’s approach to Black-liberationist leaders and organizations, whether Martin Luther King Jr. or the Black Panthers. “Through counterintelligence, it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence,” Hoover wrote.

Hoover’s classified memo was stolen from a Philadelphia-area FBI office and reported on by Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger in 1971. A congressional investigation known as the Church Committee later validated it and exposed additional aspects of COINTELPRO, along with other repressive domestic and foreign intelligence activities. A generation later, tens of millions of people heard singer Zack de la Rocha chant Hoover’s line on the Rage song “Wake Up.”

For 25 years, the so-called War on Terror’s sweeping expansions of domestic surveillance and watchlisting placed gigantic numbers of American Muslims under permanent suspicion. It has lasted so long as to become normalized – and, as was predictable, to expand to other disfavored groups, like migrants targeted by ICE. Practically as soon as the Towers fell, War on Terror enthusiasts on the right demanded the security apparatus target left and liberal groups, starting with journalist Andrew Sullivan’s portrayal of the U.S. “decadent left” as a “fifth column“ functionally in league with al-Qaeda. Sullivan later apologized for his invective. Now it’s official policy.

The world of the May 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy is a sweaty one.