President Donald Trump, Republican officials, and their right-wing media allies have laid the groundwork for a broadbased attack on core progressive and Democratic Party institutions in response to Saturday’s planned nationwide “No Kings” protests. They are reframing and weaponizing the concept of antifa as a framework to target their political enemies — and anyone else who dissents from their authoritarian political project.

Trump hosted a White House event last week about the purported scourge of antifa, an umbrella term for a broad and decentralized grouping of militant far-left activists who say they oppose fascism. In remarks to top law enforcement officials and a slate of MAGA influencers, the president promised to be “very threatening” to antifa, which he recently designated as a “domestic terror organization,” and said his administration would target “the people that fund them.”

But Trump quickly pivoted from describing purported antifa attacks on law enforcement and journalists to complaining about “paid anarchists” holding “very expensive” signs at protests. His remarks indicate that he is eager to stretch the “antifa” label so that it covers as many of his political enemies as possible — including peaceful protesters holding signs and the organizations and funders who pay for them.

The amorphous nature of antifa lends itself to such abuses. Though then-FBI director Christopher Wray explained in a 2020 congressional testimony that antifa is “not a group or an organization” but rather “a movement or an ideology,” the MAGA right typically applies the moniker to any person on the left engaged in violence, real or imagined, particularly at protests.

Other top Republican officials went even further in the days following Trump’s comments. In interviews with right-wing media outlets, they have claimed that antifa and other violent extremists are behind Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, which oppose Trump’s authoritarian actions. Organizers said that five million people attended the more than 2,000 “No Kings” rallies in June, and the protests are actually backed by an array of mainstream progressive organizations, led by Indivisible and including the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, and the League of Conservation Voters.

• House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed during an October 10 Fox interview that Democrats had planned “a hate America rally that's scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall” featuring “the pro-Hamas wing and antifa people.”
• Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said on Newsmax the same day that the Washington, D.C., rally would be “a Soros paid-for protest where his professional protesters show up,” adding: “The agitators show up. We'll have to get the National Guard out. Hopefully it will be peaceful. I doubt it."
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy alleged during a Fox Business hit on Monday that the No Kings protest “is part of antifa, paid protesters,” and said that “it begs the question who's funding it."
• House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said in a Tuesday Fox Business interview: “We call it the 'Hate America' rally because you'll see the hate for America all over this thing when they show up. … The rumor is that they can't end this shutdown beforehand because this small but very violent and vocal group is the only one that's happy about this."

Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a Tuesday night Fox appearance, similarly suggested that she sees no distinction between antifa activists whom the president has identified as criminals and terrorists and peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.

“That’s one of the things about Antifa,” she told Fox host Sean Hannity. “You’ve heard President Trump say multiple times, they are organized, they are a criminal organization. And they are very organized. You’re seeing people out there with thousands of signs that all match, pre-bought, pre-put together. They are organized, and someone is funding it. We are going to get to the funding of antifa. We are going to get to the root of antifa, and we are going to find and charge all of those people who are causing this chaos.”

The MAGA plan for Saturday seems clear. The right-wing media has spent months fearmongering about the conditions in American cities to justify Trump’s desire to deploy military and quasi-military forces on their streets. They want headlines about violence at No Kings rallies that the president can use as a pretext to target his political foes.

A Trumpist plot to criminalize dissent

Trump views criticism from his foes as illegitimate by definition, and he responded to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk by threatening a crackdown on political opposition.

Before a suspect in the killing had even been identified, Trump blamed the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” as “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” Attorney General Pam Bondi subsequently declared that the Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”; when a reporter asked Trump what she meant, he replied, “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate.” These attacks on free speech crested with the Trump administration’s attempt to drive Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Trump also promised that his administration would go after not just Kirk’s killer, but the purportedly “radical left” individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence.” Investigators have not uncovered any evidence of ties between the alleged killer and any left-wing group, NBC News reported last month — but that has not stopped Trump’s effort, echoing demands from his supporters, to use Kirk’s killing to justify the suppression of the Democratic Party and the left over the last several weeks.

Last month, Trump signed a national security directive on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” also known as “NSPM-7.” The directive, as extensively detailed by investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein, orders federal agencies to undertake “a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.” According to the document, potential indicators of political violence include “anti-fascist” rhetoric and views like “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism,” or “anti-Americanism.” The document specifically focuses the FBI’s network of roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces on combatting this purported threat.

At a signing ceremony for the directive, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that it created “an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism.” Trump, in turn, made clear how broadly he views that effort, naming major Democratic donors George Soros and Reid Hoffman as potential targets of the “domestic terrorism” crackdown. “They’re bad, and we’re going to find out if they are funding these things,” he explained. “You’re going to have some problems because they’re agitators, and they’re anarchists.”

The New York Times further reported that same day that the office of the deputy attorney general had “instructed more than a half dozen U.S. attorney’s offices to draft plans to investigate” Soros’ Open Society Foundations and had even listed “possible charges prosecutors could file, ranging from arson to material support of terrorism.” While the directive cited a report from the right-wing Capital Research Center as evidence supporting such charges, the Times subsequently reported that the document “does not show evidence that Mr. Soros’s network knowingly paid for its grantees to break the law, which legal experts said would be necessary to build a criminal case,” and the group’s president acknowledged to the paper that it did not show evidence of a crime.

A Reuters investigation published October 9 likewise suggests that the Trump administration is considering looking into core Democratic Party supporters like Soros, party infrastructure like the fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue, and Indivisible, the lead organizer behind the No Kings rallies that Republican officials claim are a front for antifa.

Saturday’s No Kings rallies present a potential opportunity for the Trump administration to take this effort to the next level. If no violence develops, they will move on and wait for their next chance. But if a conflict involving No Kings protesters breaks out anywhere in the country — particularly if there’s a standoff with the increasingly violent and unaccountable federal law enforcement apparatus, then all bets are off.

The right’s propagandists, eager for “war” on the left and fully enmeshed with the administration, will seize on the incident and try to turn it into a national story by whatever dishonest means are necessary. Trump officials who have lost all credibility lying on his behalf will leap to smear the left as a whole as responsible. Fox and its ilk will run whatever footage is available on a loop while their demagogic stars demand action.

Then the federal law enforcement agencies, which are serving as extensions of the president, will go to work finding ways to target the organizations and funders involved in the protests. Any career prosecutors and investigators or even Trump appointees who oppose such tactics will be ruthlessly purged.

Trump will have gotten exactly what he wanted — a chance to bend the No Kings protests to his own authoritarian ends.