Trump's Antifa Roundtable

Yesterday, cult leader, convicted felon, and failed President Donald Trump held a roundtable on Antifa. The participants included a number of high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Kash Patel (apparently referred to within the White House as "a giant douche canoe"), and world-class hater Stephen Miller (who remained silent). In addition, there were a number of so-called "journalists" who were in reality right-wing influencers. They included Nick Sortor, Jack Posobiec, Cam Higby, Jonathan Choe, Andy Ngo, Katie Daviscourt, James Klug, Savanah Hernandez, Nick Shirley, Brandi Kruse, and Julio Rojas. While apparently aimed at shedding light on Antifa, the roundtable was actually an exercise in disinformation, lies, and propaganda.

I have come to the conclusion that Trump fully intends to tamper with upcoming elections. He may or may not be able to implement his plans before the 2026 midterms, but certainly he hopes to prevent the 2028 Presidential election from being fairly held. This may seem hyperbolic or conspiratorial, but listen to the most recent episode of Kerry McQuisten's Common Sense Sanctuary podcast. McQuisten is a prominent Republican activist in Oregon. He and another activist discussed their recent trip to Washington, D.C. where they met with Trump officials about a plan to nullify Oregon's 2026 elections by refusing to seat Oregon's Congressional delegation based on a federal voter ID law (which doesn't currently exist). Trump really doesn't want fair elections.

I believe that Trump has a multi-step plan to interfere with elections. Central to the plan is to take control of the voting process in heavily Democratic areas. He will do this by exerting federal control over such places. In order to justify federal intervention, Trump needs suitable grounds. As we have seen during federal deployments in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland, Memphis, and Chicago, crime has been one such excuse. But crime has shortcomings as a justification. First, crime is falling in the cities that Trump wants to target. Second, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection can be used to target immigrants, Trump has greater ambitions. He really wants to send military troops. U.S. law restricts when the military can be used for law enforcement. However, military forces have much greater leeway when they are deployed to protect federal facilities or employees. Therefore, violent attacks on ICE and CBP personnel or ICE facilities can provide a legal rationale for deploying federalized National Guard units or regular military detachments.

This creates an incentive for Trump to manufacture such violent attacks. One tactic that has been used is for ICE to initiate violence against peaceful protesters outside ICE facilities. This has happened in both Chicago and Portland where peaceful protesters have been met by violent ICE tactics, often filmed by government photographers and then carefully edited to appear as if the violence was on the part of the protesters. Another tactic is the creation of a dangerous enemy against whom all peace-loving Americans should unite. For that role, Trump has chosen Antifa. Yesterday's roundtable should be viewed in the context of that goal. It was a step in a larger plan.

One fly in this particular ointment is that Antifa does not exist as an organization in the United States. An obvious goal of the roundtable was to convince the public that Antifa does actually exist, even if there is no such organization. Almost all of the participants in the roundtable addressed this dilemma by simply describing all Trump opponents as "Antifa". All protesters were referred to as "Antifa". Charlie Kirk's assassin was called "Antifa". The shooter at the ICE facility in Dallas was said to be "Antifa". Even the attempted assassin of Trump in Butler, PA was called "Antifa". There is no evidence to support any of these allegations, and there are considerable grounds to refute them. Nevertheless, Trump and his supporters are using "Antifa" as a catch-all description of all Trump opponents.

In a better world, the influencers who participated in the roundtable would be correctly seen as a lunatic fringe. In today's world, they are the mainstays of the MAGA movement. This highlights one reality of the Trump administration. As I have written before, the Trump administration is largely made up of Internet trolls. More often than not, Administration actions are taken with a view as to how they will play online. Increasingly, Trump officials are locked in a feedback loop with online influencers, providing soundbites for online approval and then reacting based on the response. Think back to the group of MAGA influencers who were given binders of supposed Epstein files and then posed outside the White House waving them in the air. That went over great until it turned out the binders contained nothing new, but it had been Bondi's effort to win favor with online influencers. To a great extent, the influencers and the administration see themselves as part of the same team, working together for victory.

This synergy between the influencers and the administration was very evident during the roundtable. There were no experts on Antifa included. Many of the participants, for example, Jack Posobiec, are long-time conspiracy theorists. All were essentially propagandists who clearly understood their role. Shockingly, Trump even appeared to rely on the influencers to help set government policies. For instance, at one point, one of the influencers asked Trump if he would designate Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization. Trump has already declared Antifa to be a domestic terrorist organization, but that is not a legal designation and has no real relevance. Trump may as well have declared Antifa to be "Santa's helpers". But the foreign terrorist organization designation has real legal meaning and, in fact, is the basis of Trump's justification for blowing up Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean. This would be a major step with likely repercussions in European countries such as Germany, where Antifa has a major presence. Nevertheless, Trump — who appeared to have never considered such a thing previously — asked the influencers what they thought of the idea. When they responded enthusiastically, he turned to the administration officials and said, "Sounds good to me" and "let's get it done." Trump also claimed that "a lot of the best information we find is through you and people like you" and repeatedly urged the influencers to provide information to Bondi and Patel. Patel leads one of the largest and most sophisticated investigative organizations in the world, but is expected to rely on Internet influencers for information?

To hear the participants — both government and influencers — tell it, Antifa is a vast, well-funded organization that has its tentacles spread throughout the country. However, its existence is being hidden by the combined efforts of Democratic governmental officials and the mainstream media (except for Fox News). According to Trump, Antifa has completely destroyed Portland, and none of the stores have glass windows anymore, instead being covered with plywood. He said that Portland looks worse than many bombed-out European cities after World War II. None of this is remotely true, but it shows the combined effects of Trump's cognitive decline and the controlled media environment in which he lives. Everyone in the room other than Trump was aware that what Trump was saying was false, but nobody dared correct him.

Some of the influencers struggled to reconcile the claim that Antifa exists as an entity that should be confronted with the reality that Antifa is an amorphous movement with no structure or any attributes of an organization. One of the influencers (sorry, I didn't catch his name, but it may have been Julio Rojas), for instance, admitted that Antifa has no organizational structure but then went on to compare Antifa to gangs of bank robbers. This inadvertently was closer to the truth than much of what else was said. The existence of bank robbers in Los Angeles as well as the existence of bank robbers in New York City is not evidence of a nationwide bank-robbing organization. Nevertheless, the influencer claimed that people show up at the same place at the same time and have the same message and, therefore, there had to be an organization behind them. In reality, it takes little more than a chat group or a social media post to arrange such a gathering. Similarly, another of the influencers said that she understood the challenge with "Antifa as a graspable entity" — something that it is not. But, she continued, behavior should be prosecuted. True enough, but the specter of confronting a small number of violent individuals rather than an organized violent group is less useful to the Trump administration's greater goals. Almost comically, another influencer struggled to define Antifa before coming up with the concept that it is a "disorganized group". In other words, an organization that lacks organization.

There is a lot more to be said about this topic, and I may write about it again tomorrow. But, I want to emphasize that this roundtable should not be viewed in a vacuum. It was an organized propaganda effort aimed at convincing the public that Antifa presents a dangerous challenge to public safety. Alleged Antifa violence will be used to justify the deployment of military forces to American cities. Those troops, in turn, will allow federal control of the cities and position the Trump administration to interfere with future elections.