A memorandum from US Attorney General Pam Bondi, issued December 4, instructs all federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to compile lists of organizations to be slandered and criminalized as “domestic terrorists” because they oppose fascism and capitalism and advocate for socialism.
The six-page document, uncovered and made public by journalist Ken Klippenstein, is a blueprint for federal officials on how to implement National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), issued by Trump on September 25, after the assassination of ultra-right activist Charlie Kirk, a close associate of the fascist cabal in the White House.
NSPM-7 is so broadly worded that, as the WSWS warned at the time, it would criminalize virtually all political opposition to the Trump administration, even including the Democratic Party, which holds 47 out of 100 seats in the US Senate and 213 out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives.
Its language is reproduced in the Bondi memorandum, which describes “domestic terrorists” as advocating “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity” and “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality …”
It is likely that the majority of the American people, and vast majority of young people, hold such oppositional views, given the deep alienation produced by decades of declining living standards, endless imperialist wars, the deliberate promotion of religious backwardness and anti-scientific nostrums and the transformation of the Republican Party into an openly fascistic organization.
The rising support for socialism is expressed both in opinion polls—again, particularly among young people—and the electoral success of figures like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (who campaigned under the socialist label while advocating minor liberal reforms, which he is already abandoning). While Mamdani groveled before Trump at the White House, the Trump administration is targeting Mamdani’s supporters—and perhaps Mamdani himself—for violent repression.
A major factor underlying the actions of the Trump administration is preparations for elections in 2026. In addition to the Bondi memo, Trump officials have repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, giving the president the authority to deploy the military domestically. This would allow for any elections, if held at all, to proceed under conditions of effective martial law.
The latest document from Bondi spells out a series of steps by federal officials and agencies to fulfill Trump’s demand for a sweeping crackdown on political opposition.
Within 14 days of the issuance of the Bondi memorandum—December 18, 2025—all federal law enforcement agencies are to deliver to the FBI all files “for Antifa and Antifa-related intelligence and information.” Given that Antifa is not an actual organization but rather a label applied to anyone engaged in anti-fascist political activity of any kind, this means the centralization into the hands of the FBI of all information on virtually all left-wing political groups.
Within 30 days—January 3, 2026—the FBI is to compile a master list of “groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” (emphasis added), provide it to the Deputy Attorney General, and issue an initial report on the development of strategies “to disrupt and dismantle entire networks of criminal activity” (i.e., the suppression of political opposition).
Also within 30 days, the FBI is to upgrade its telephone and social media tip lines for domestic terror threats “so that witnesses and citizen journalists can send media of suspected acts of domestic terrorism to law enforcement online.” The aim, as demonstrated in Portland and other cities, is to use fascist vigilantes as spotters to direct violent police attacks against left-wing protests.
Within 60 days, the FBI and its partner agencies “shall disseminate an intelligence bulletin on Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups. The bulletin should describe the relevant organizations’ structures, funding, sources and tactics …” The aim here is to frame up organizers of peaceful protests at which supposed Antifa or police provocateurs engage in violence.
In addition, in order to recruit paid informants to spy on and infiltrate left-wing organizations, the FBI “shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations that conspire with others to commit violations of provisions of law … or other offenses against the United States.
“As investigations continue and potential prosecutions begin,” the memorandum continues, the FBI “shall aim to establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members and leadership” of the targeted organizations. In other words, informants will become stool pigeons and state witnesses in show trials of the supposed “domestic terrorists.”
The Bondi memorandum lists no less than 25 separate legal provisions that could potentially be used against targeted groups. This lumps together such crimes as murder for hire and planting explosives with non-violent civil disobedience tactics, described as “resisting or impeding federal officers” and “picketing or parading with intent to obstruct the administration of justice.” Virtually any political act of protest against Trump’s immigration Gestapo would be criminalized on this basis.
Whenever Trump and his fascist cohorts speak of “domestic terrorism,” they are not referring to actual advocates of violence but to left-wing political opposition, particularly that developing from the working class. Trump’s real attitude towards political violence was shown in his action on the first day he reentered the White House, when he pardoned all of the fascist thugs who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and temporarily halted the congressional certification of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
It is a measure of their utter cynicism and contempt for public opinion that Trump and Bondi propose to use the same laws under which the January 6 rioters were indicted and convicted to target those who oppose the administration’s persecution of immigrants and its preparations for presidential dictatorship.
While they denounce “anti-fascism,” claiming it is a smear tactic and a pretext for violence, the same administration has just issued a National Security Strategy document that openly aligns US foreign policy with fascist parties in Europe like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the French National Rally (RN), and effectively embraces the neo-Nazi “Great Replacement Theory,” that whites are being deliberately replaced by non-whites in a conspiracy orchestrated by wealthy Jews.
In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Socialist Equality Party issued a statement summing up the dangers posed to democratic rights and warning working people and young people. We declared: “It is necessary to put aside all self-deluding hopes that what is unfolding is anything less than a drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, based on the military, police, paramilitary forces and fascist gangs.”
In the 80 days which have passed, the danger has not lessened. On the contrary, the Trump administration has begun to systematize its attacks on democratic rights, beginning with the persecution of immigrant workers but directed ultimately against the entire working class.
This is a government of the oligarchy, waging an all-out war on the working class. It is carrying out the destruction of vital social programs that millions depend on: slashing public education, privatizing healthcare, gutting retirement and disability benefits and dismantling what remains of the social safety net. Nothing that detracts from the accumulation of wealth by the corporate and financial elite is to be spared.
The decisive question remains one of political organization and leadership. The Democratic Party will not fight Trump’s drive towards dictatorship because, like him, it is a party of the financial aristocracy, committed above all to the defense of the super-rich and the capitalist state machine.
The response of the Democratic Party to the Bondi memo has been one of silence. Leading Democrats have not only failed to denounce this fascistic declaration of war against political opposition—They have made clear through their actions that they will do nothing to stop Trump’s drive toward dictatorship. Their response to the mass opposition expressed in the October “No Kings” demonstrations was to end the government shutdown on Trump’s terms and bail out the administration. When it comes to the assault on left-wing opponents of inequality, war and dictatorship, the Democrats—a party of Wall Street and American imperialism—are co-conspirators.
The Bondi memo must be understood as part of an ongoing and escalating conspiracy. The Trump administration, in crisis and facing growing opposition, is not retreating. It is doubling down. The working class must respond with its own offensive.
It must intervene independently by building new forms of organization—rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools and neighborhoods—that unify workers across industries and national boundaries. These committees, coordinated through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), must become centers of resistance to Trump’s dictatorship and the entire capitalist system.
The fight to defend democratic rights is inseparable from the fight for socialism. The turn toward dictatorship is the political expression of the rule of the capitalist oligarchy. The defense of the most basic democratic rights requires the mobilization of the working class to expropriate the oligarchy, abolish capitalism and reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.