The Pentagon refused to offer further details about the initiative. The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe, said a defense official, speaking at the time on the condition of anonymity. We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.
Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order claiming to designate antifa a loose-knit anti-fascist movement as a domestic terror organization. He also issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target anti-fascism movements and domestic terrorist organizations. Such enemies, according to the president, not only espouse anti-Americanism and support for the overthrow of the United States Government, but also are typified by advocacy of opinions protected by the First Amendment, including anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
After referring to the war from within during his address to the military's top officers, he cast his political rivals as subhuman and claimed that they needed to be dealt with. We have to take care of this little gnat that's on our shoulder called the Democrats, he told the sailors during the Navy's 250th anniversary celebration.
The Trump administration has also admitted that its waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress. According to a confidential notice from the Department of War sent to lawmakers, the president has unilaterally decided that the United States is engaged in a declared state of non-international armed conflict with designated terrorist organizations or DTO's. It described three people killed by U.S. commandos on what was claimed to be a boat carrying drugs in the Caribbean last month as unlawful combatants, as if they were soldiers on a battlefield. And that was a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement, not the U.S. military, arrests suspected drug dealers rather than summarily executing them.
As Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in counterterrorism issues, as well as the laws of war, pointed out, the White Houses claims that Trump has the authority to use lethal force against anyone he decides is a member of a DTO is extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing. As he put it: Because there's no articulated limiting principles, the President could simply use this prerogative to kill any people he labels as terrorists, like antifa. He could use it at home in the United States.
Police State USA
The Trump administrations military occupations of American cities, its deployment of tens of thousands of troops across the United States, its emerging framework for designating and targeting domestic enemies, its dehumanization of its political foes, and its assertion that the president has the right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists have left this country on the precipice of authoritarian rule.
With Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, while claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, the threat to the rule of law in the United States is not just profound but historically unprecedented.
Copyright 2025 Nick Turse
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