Security expert reveals Trump’s plot to use 'terror powers' against his enemies

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U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. Reuters / Yves Herman

Last week, the Trump administration quietly revealed the scheme it will use to label its opponents as domestic terrorists and target the power of government against them. So blatant is the undemocratic nature of their plan that one of President Donald Trump’s closest aides declared that when it is put into action, appeals to civil liberties “must fall on deaf ears.”

This is according to security expert Miles Taylor, who served in the Department of National Security during Trump’s first term and acted as a whistleblower when he shared the existence of a resistance movement within the White House. Taylor asserts that the Trump administration has developed a “workaround to use terror powers against his foes.”

As Taylor explains, “Last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathered representatives from 66 countries at the State Department for something called the ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.’ Stephen Miller was there to help rally the world against ‘far-left political terrorism.’ The actual purpose was something else. Trump’s team was road-testing its blueprint for using America’s counterterrorism machine against the president’s enemies. And buried in the speeches was the legal trick they’re planning to use.”

To understand the plot, Taylor notes, it is important to keep in mind that “there is no such thing as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ under U.S. law. The government can only designate foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah. When I helped run the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration, those labels allowed us to take powerful action against global adversaries, including asset seizures, sweeping surveillance and prosecutions that could put a group’s supporters away for decades.”

But because there is no legal domestic equivalent, Trump is unable to use these powers against his political opponents at home, so he’s taking steps to circumvent the law. According to Taylor, Trump started by issuing an executive order declaring antifa a “major terrorist organization,” despite the fact that there is no such thing as an antifa organization.

“It’s a fake label,” writes Taylor. “They’re using it to open investigations into groups that don’t like the president. Even still, they cannot use the government’s most sweeping anti-terror powers against these folks. They must find other crimes if they want to bring a prosecution, like money laundering or fraud. Which brings us to the workaround.”

Here Taylor explains the three-step plan Rubio quietly laid out last week:

“ONE, they’ll designate foreign groups and call them ‘antifa.’ Last November, the State Department added four obscure European far-left groups to the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, labeling all of them ‘antifa.’ Almost nobody reported this tiny detail: only one of the four — a German outfit called Antifa Ost — even identifies with the antifa movement. There’s no clear evidence linking any of them to activists in the United States. That didn’t matter. The point wasn’t the groups. The point was getting the word ‘antifa’ onto the FTO list. And Rubio promised this past Thursday that ‘more designations’ are coming.”

“TWO, they’ll declare it one big transnational network. This is what the ministerial was really for. Rubio told the assembled diplomats that today’s far-left militants ‘coordinate,’ ‘communicate,’ and ‘act together’ across borders and that they can ‘raise money in one country,’ train in another and strike in a third. Miller claimed antifa factions worldwide draw from ‘common networks of funding, organization and information sharing.’ Notice what’s happening. They’re constructing a factual predicate that American activists are connected to the foreign groups they just designated.”

“THREE, they’ll use ‘material support’ as the bridge to go after American citizens. Under federal law, knowingly providing ‘material support’ to a designated FTO is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. And material support is defined in breathtakingly broad terms. It can be money, ‘services,’ ‘training,’ ‘advice or assistance' or ‘personnel.’ Critics of the statute have warned that even sharing a Wikipedia link with a designated group could qualify.”

According to Taylor, “once the government claims a left-wing nonprofit or a protest network is somehow providing ‘material support’ to a foreign terror movement, the entire post-9/11 arsenal unlocks. That means it’s easier for them to activate spy powers meant to monitor al-Qaeda; freeze bank accounts; seize assets; add individuals to terror watchlists; track financial transactions and more. They don’t have to commit violence. They just have to be linked (by the government’s own say-so) to a network the government itself defined. That’s the workaround.”

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