“‘Crushing Radical Left Terrorism.’”

What does the Trump regime’s new offensive tell us about this moment in the American story?

Not among friends. Hoover in the Oval Office, February 1961. (Abbie Rowe, National Archives/ Wikimedia Commons.)

21 JULY—I do not know what we should call the Trump regime’s new offensive against “extremist violence from the political left,” also known as “far-left terrorism,” also known as “left-wing terrorist attacks and plots,” also known as “a new wave of this old evil.” I suppose we could start with “offensive,” as in an offensive offensive, but let us expand the vocabulary in the cause of understanding “Trump Administration Unleashes Global Campaign to Crush Radical Left Terrorism,” the White House document that announced its offensive offensive last Thursday.

The above-cited phrases belong to Marco Rubio, who addressed three score and some senior ministers at the State Department as the White House went public with its latest operation against its political opponents, because the fight against this recrudescent specter is a global fight, you see. “Under President Trump,” as the White House release explains, “Radical Left Terrorism is finally being confronted as the organized, transnational threat is actually is.”

Let’s see. Straight off the top, this just-declared operation is stunningly paranoid, and I don’t see there is any arguing this. Maybe you have to be a certain age to recognize its retrograde character, reeking as it does of the delusory swoon J. Edgar Hoover et al. sponsored in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s infamous Cointelpro programs fell apart on exposure to the light of day. As Kash Patel instantly made clear as Rubio spoke, he cannot wait to be the next Hoover. Given the cross-dressing director’s place in history, is this a weird aspiration or what?

Based on National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 of September 2025, wherein Trump declared a whole-of-government offensive against “domestic terrorism”—of the “Left–Wing” kind, of course—this latest declaration of war is intended to “identify, disrupt, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists operating in our country,” as Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy adviser, puts it. So we can add “dangerous” to our descriptives. If the going gets as heavy as Cointelpro was at its worst, this new iteration could so prove.

Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of this formal declaration of authoritarianism. On the nitty side, it is plain from the White House document and Rubio’s presentation of it that the Trump regime is in the grip of a creeping desperation. The victories of social democrats of various stripes in recent elections have Trump calling them all “Communists.” Beyond this, it is evident that American public opinion is tilting, measurably now, leftward toward a populism that is genuinely populist. Anxiety in the upper reaches of power tips into fear.

As to the gritty, this latest aggression against all of us, no exceptions, is simply too stupid to work. The broadly stated intention seems to be just the same as Hoover’s and McCarthy’s seven and some decades ago: to make sure America remains the most right-wing nation in the West, which is to say more or less in the world. I do not see this succeeding. As a reading of our time the Campaign to Crush Radical Left Terrorism seems to me dumb on the way to laughable were it not so potentially destructive. As an attempt at apple-pie fascism it is likely to make a mess, depending on how vigorously the regime presses its case, but the net of it will be the further alienation of power from people.