By Melinda Haas
A largely overlooked directive issued by the Trump administration marks a major shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy, one that threatens bedrock free speech rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, is a presidential directive that for the first time appears to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.
You’ve probably heard a lot about President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. But as an international relations scholar who has studied U.S. foreign policy decision-making and national security legislation, I recognize that presidents can take several types of executive actions without legislative involvement: executive orders, memoranda and proclamations.
This structure allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight.
This seventh national security memorandum from the Trump White House pushes the limits of presidential authority by targeting individuals and groups as potential domestic terrorists based on their beliefs rather than their actions.
The memorandum represents a profound shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy, one that risks undermining foundational American commitments to free speech and association.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Presidential national security powers
Executive memoranda instruct government officials and agencies by delegating tasks and directing agency actions.
They can, for example, order a department to prepare reports, implement new policies, coordinate interagency efforts or review existing programs to align with the administration’s priorities.
Unlike executive orders, they are not required to be published. When these memoranda, like NSPM-7, relate to national security and military and foreign policy, they are called national security directives, although the specific name of these directives changes with each administration.
Many of these directives are classified. They may not be declassified, if at all, until years or decades after the end of the administration that issued them.
The stated purpose of NSPM-7 is to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence, focusing mainly on perceived threats from the political left. The memorandum identifies “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as potential indicators that a group or person will commit domestic terrorism.
The memorandum claims that political violence originates with “anti-fascist” groups that hold the following views: “support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The strategy laid out in NSPM-7 includes preemptive measures to disrupt groups before they engage in violent political acts. For example, multiagency task forces are empowered to investigate potential federal crimes related to radicalization, as well as the funders of those potential crimes.
‘Domestic terrorist organizations’
The memorandum directs the Department of Justice to focus the resources of the FBI’s approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces on investigating “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.”
NSPM-7 also allows the attorney general to propose groups for designation as “domestic terrorist organizations.” That includes groups that engage in the following behaviors: “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.”
Existing laws allow the secretary of state to designate groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” that are then subject to financial sanctions.
But these laws do not permit the president to label domestic groups this way.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Defining terrorism
NSPM-7 marks a major conceptual shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy. Its focus on domestic terrorism significantly departs from historical approaches that primarily targeted foreign threats.
Earlier presidential directives largely defined terrorism as a foreign threat to be countered through military power, diplomacy and international cooperation.
Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the U.S. government had treated terrorism as a global menace to democratic institutions, emphasizing protection of citizens and allies abroad. By moving away from a traditional law enforcement framework and recasting terrorism as an act of war, the Reagan administration situated the issue within the broader realm of Cold War geopolitics and military advantage.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration reframed terrorism as both a foreign policy and domestic security challenge, particularly after high-profile attacks such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton’s policy highlighted the dangers of transnational networks and the need to defend critical infrastructure.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration fused counterterrorism with national defense. The Bush-initiated global war on terrorism expanded the concept of who constituted a threat to include countries that harbored or aided terrorist organizations.
The Obama administration tried to narrow and regulate those powers by embedding counterterrorism within a system of legal rules and procedures. The key question, according to the declassified guidance, was whether the targeted individuals “pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.”
This standard was not focused on ideology but rather on tactical considerations, such as the feasibility of capture and continued threat to U.S. interests.
For example, the lethal drone strike on al-Qaida propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011 was justified on the basis that he was actively involved in plotting attacks and remained unreachable for capture.
During the first Trump presidency, executive orders were used to change counterterrorism policy, most notably through several iterations of a “travel ban” that attempted to restrict immigration from terror-prone countries such as Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
The Biden administration redirected attention toward preventing catastrophic threats, especially from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of groups or individuals outside of governments, such as terrorist organizations.
First Amendment rights at risk
There is no single official definition of terrorism in U.S. law.
Instead, laws use different definitions based on their purpose, whether criminal law or laws relating to intelligence collection or civil liability.
Definitions in all those areas typically focus on identifying violent or dangerous acts done with the intent to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy.
But more than redefining terrorism, NSPM-7 reorients the machinery of national security toward the policing of belief.
The First Amendment generally prevents the government from punishing people for unpopular opinions. It also protects the ability for people to associate to advance public and private ideas in pursuit of political, economic, religious or cultural goals.
The directive’s emphasis on ideological orientations – “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism” and “anti-American” views – as indicators of domestic terrorism potentially jeopardizes First Amendment rights.
Thirty-one members of Congress sent a letter to Trump expressing “serious concerns” about NSPM-7, warning that it poses “serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest or ideological speech.”
As the ACLU warns, any definition of terrorism that includes ideological components risks criminalizing people or groups based on belief rather than based on violence or other criminal conduct.
Congress has declined to create a domestic complement to the foreign terrorist designation in large part because of the potential for impinging on First Amendment–protected association and speech.
But I fear that chilling speech may be the point.
Silencing dissent
NSPM-7 does not authorize new actions in the legal and institutional framework for counterterrorism. It does not criminalize previously legal conduct.
Rather, it states that the Trump administration’s investigative focus will be around the identity and ideology of supposed perpetrators. Prioritizing investigations into this broad swath of ideologies serves to instill fear, silencing anti-fascist and other messages in opposition to the Trump administration.
Law professor Steve Vladeck frames this chill as “obeying in advance,” in which organizations self-censor rather than risk investigation, prosecution or defending against the “domestic terrorist” label.
Although left-wing violence has risen in the past decade, empirical evidence proves that this violence remains at very low absolute levels, well below historical levels of right-wing or jihadist violence.
In fact, most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.
Yet NSPM-7 focuses disproportionately on left-wing ideologies. NSPM-7 departs from prior U.S. counterterrorism frameworks by prioritizing the suppression of ideologically motivated dissent, even in the absence of concrete evidence of violent intent.
Melinda Haas is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
Bo Peep says
Protesting is not domestic terrorism, having an opinion is not political dissent. Attacking, obstructing, and interfering with federal officers is terrorism. Quit fighting for communism, socialism and illegal aliens and go home. You made us all get the jab, reported us for having family dinners and mandated masks for toddlers. You are the schmazies.l not the Republicans.
Deborah Coffey says
Well, except for trying to save toddlers’ lives, WE didn’t do any of those things and we are not communists or socialists. Nor are we pedophiles, murderers, thieves, liars, fraudsters, excessive adulterers and dumb as rocks. We’re just Democrats trying to save our country from becoming Russia.
Kennan says
So you’re saying, having an opinion is fine, but keep it to yourself.
Descent is the most American thing you can do. In many ways it’s what this country was built on.
So now protesting is obstruction of justice.
Who’s justice? Your first amendment? The one that works for you and your interests?
You need to go back to the drawing board and do some homework.
Learn some history, but understand that history is just a compilation of facts. Some we like and some, we hate.
The constitution in the Bill of Rights has a very clear cut set of rules and rights.NOT YOUR RIGHTS! OUR RIGHTS AS A COUNTRY!
Samuel L. Bronkowitz says
Oh look, Western individualism. Why should I care about other people when I can just be a big ole piece of shit instead?
Skibum says
Well, well, well… it is certainly good to hear that you agree that the maga mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 at the behest of the orange faced moron were guilty of terrorism!
Breaking news… didn’t you hear that he pardoned ALL of them??? Exactly what a convicted felon con man would do, don’t you think?
Laurel says
Bo Peep: Your ICE agents are being recruited with a $50K signing bonus, special overtime pay, training time cut in half, school debt forgiveness (oh, remember that?) and age limitation dropped. They are aiming at Generation Z to sign up. Now there’s real experience you can depend on! The propaganda for this signup is blatant. Are you that naive? This is not about immigration, and seriously, I hope you don’t learn what it really is about too late. It continues to be mind blowing what people don’t see, or want to see.
Unless you were tied up by the government during Covid, no one made you get the jab. That’s not true. What in the hell are you talking about “reported for having family dinners, and mandated masks for toddlers”? Where were you? My husband and I went out wherever we wanted to go, and if a place required masks, so what? We were in a pandemic and no one knew what to do while people were dying and bodies being kept in refrigerated trucks.
Geez, how some of you folks can keep on supporting this bullshit is beyond me. Are you real?
Skibum says
It is a common, maga ailment: Distorted reality from existing on Earth 2, sitting in front of their TVs absorbing all of the fauxinfotainment nuze propaganda like the mushroom-like fungi they are. Then they stand up and spout that same nonsense as if it came from God. Sad, when you stop to think about it.
Pogo says
@Now you know
… magaholes actually can comment on the intertubes; even, while seat belted to a bedside commode and fed by a tube: in a place where a light is always on overhead, the wall mounted boob tube is always tuned to Pox — and the exit doors have the required lighted sign, and alarm.
Winning, winning — winning. Maga, maga — maga.
Joe D says
Maybe we should all rewatch Tom Cruise starring in the movie MINORITY REPORT. He played the role of a policeman in a futuristic society, where there was almost no crime. SOUNDS GOOD DOESN’T IT?
To accomplish that, the government held 3 “presentient” citizens ( people who had documented visions of future crimes), in suspended animation who could consider the LIKELIHOOD that an individual could POTENTIALLY commit a serious crime IN THE FUTURE. There were 3 “votes”….it ONLY took 2 votes to decide the person should be arrested and imprisoned based on the LIKELIHOOD they would commit the crime. They even played back “mental recordings” from these 3 future predicting “judges” as PROOF of the suspect’s “INTENDED” CRIMES. If one judge’s vision didn’t match the other 2 it was called a “Minority Report,” and the vision was thrown out as invalid. That’s all it took to arrest/convict/ and jail suspects. This REALLY dropped the crime rate….until CRUISE’S character was charged/convicted and placed in frozen sleep prison for a crime he was ALLEGEDLY GOING TO COMMIT!
It turned out the future “visions” could be incomplete…and in Cruise’s case fabricated and manipulated!
Given all the Tom Cruise action movies, this one is my FAVORITE! It showed that there really needs to be “due process” and people shouldn’t be designated “Terrorists/ criminals” for simply disagreeing with the government or PEACEFULLY protesting potentially inappropriate/unlawful GOVERNMENT behaviors.
Unfortunately for those of you who didn’t pay attention in European History class in high school. Trump’s use of this process is right out of Hitler’s playbook ( in my opinion) as he was rising to ABSOLUTE power in Nazi Germany before World War II! …..Absolutely FRIGHTENING!
Even if these accused TERRORISTS Trump has designated, are never fully charged…the cost of having to defend themselves in court or the Media will likely bankrupt the individual or the organization, even if they legally “win” the appeal. Of course, if you read the way the Memorandum is written…there is little to no appeal process, and contrary to the American court system (where you are innocent until PROVEN GUILTY)…under this Trump rule, if you are designated a “Terrorist organization or individual ( even with no documented proof), you are considered GUILTY until you are proven INNOCENT! With your ability to accept donations or to continue your mission ( with no TRIAL) simply STOPPED.
Ray W., I’m sure you can explain the legal technicalities in the way this new rule was designed and implemented.
James says
September of this year was a busy month for Trump…
September 1st – suspected drug boat destroyed… with a questionable second strike, killing two survivors.
September 25th – the aforementioned executive order is signed.
September 30th – the president calls together all high ranking military personnel from every branch of service to an unprecedented meeting in Virginia.
Dates matter.
It's not how you play the game says
… it’s whether you win or lose.
So it was overheard said once, in a mythical ghostly town pretending to be a city on the edge of the abyss named Palm Coast… on November the 9th, 2016.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/us/politics/supreme-court-texas-congressional-maps.html
laurel says
I think many of you have had enough, though, amazingly, some of you haven’t.
What Trump is proposing is a war on the U.S. citizens, make no mistake, and here is how it’s panning out for me, and others I see on these raids in cities that don’t want the ICE Police there. It’s not about immigration, it’s about controlling the masses.
I am a 73 year old woman who has always trusted my government, though it’s not yet the perfect union. I have always loved my country, and believed that I am very, very lucky to have lived here. I was born and raised in Florida. I have no criminal record or arrests. I have worked at honest jobs all my life, and stepped on no one. I have never had a paranoid episode, and have never feared the police. However, after seeing U.S. citizens being snatched off the streets by men in masks, gloves, covered worse than the KKK, and shoved in unmarked vehicles, and driven off to who knows where, I fear for my fellow citizens.
I no longer trust my government. I no longer believe what they are telling me. I see the propaganda. I no longer trust the Supreme Court. I no longer trust the police. When our Police Departments, and our Sheriff’s Departments are happy to jump into this charade “to help,” I no longer trust the deputies. This is not the country I grew up in. Not long ago, I was pulled over by two policemen at night as one of my tail lights was out. No big deal, right? If that happened to me today, I would be very concerned, and skeptical of the cops. I no longer know where they are mentally coming from. I no longer see them as “Peace Officers,” who are here to “Serve and Protect.” We will no longer be able to trust the very people we need to trust.
I’m not brown or black, I am white, and do not have the ethnic look that the Supreme Court of the United States of America, has decided was okay to harass. Now it continues, and that target has changed. I have opinions. Opinions that do not align with the current administration. I have resistance, something Trump and his cabinet of fools rail against. I am not a conformist, and that could be a problem.
We are losing our freedom, and our rights. We are losing our freedom of speech, and our freedom of opinions. We are accepting the normalization of loss of freedom, loss of life without due process, loss of liberty and justice, loss of the very America ability to protest and to speak truth to power, and maybe, we will lose the Constitution.
We are witnessing the President fight to keep money from children’s SNAP program, while giving 40 billion dollars to Argentina. America first. We are witnessing him claim the murder of strangers as a war on drug smugglers, while pardoning a major drug smuggler. How are you witnessing this with your eyes and your ears, and ignoring the obvious reality?
Yet, some of you will vote for more of the same. Some of you will accept the unacceptable. Some of you will continue to rally around this abuse of power against our own citizens. So, if this is what you like, and what you want, then sit down and shut up, and learn how to be good little boys and girls. Learn to be “Christians” who ignore Jesus. Learn to pretend that what you heard from this administration is truth. Have only the opinions allowed to you. Stay with Fox and Newmax, and they will make it all be okay for you.
Kennan says
Well, done, Laurel!
It’s a shame we live in an atmosphere where we have to continue to press our foot on the necks of so many so-called leaders that ignore the obvious.
Joe D says
Reply to Laurel..
Bravo! I couldn’t have summed it up any better or more accurately !
I’m White , Christian and only a few years younger than you…and I am personally APPALLED at what is being allowed as LEGAL GOVERNANCE in this country since January 2025!
How can so many people in the US…and especially those in elected government positions, simply LOOK THE OTHER WAY, as the rule of law, and our very constitution are being violated.
Tony Mack says
Recalling history — 90 million Germans followed their convicted felon off the cliffs of humanity, as well. Ordinary citizens — butchers, cobblers, bakers, — ordinary people like our neighbors down the street, shouldered their rifles and without question executed people who may have been their neighbors or friends.
Now, we have armed thugs, paid mercenaries collecting people off the streets, taking mothers from their children at schools, kidnapping workmen at jobs they may have held for years. Those are not the criminals, the MS-13 gangsters the Administration said they were going after. And yet, some neighbors still think it’s okay to conduct these operations because “they are illegal’s, although may are in the process of obtaining the citizenship.
Think Germany in the Thirties…end of story…end of democracy…
Skibum says
Thank you, Laurel. I too, share your legitimate concerns and fear for all of us, including myself, who are living here or even visiting this country under the orange faced terror’s gestapo-like political police. And I shouldn’t have to ever be worried about such things, having spent an entire career in law enforcement as a Caucasian male with no arrest record just like yourself.
But here we are, in the far, far off land of Amerika.
Laurel says
Skibum: I worried about you as I wrote my comment, being that you had a career in Law Enforcement. You are the person whom I could call on for safety. Now, today, I have lost much faith in the current safety officers. If they are supporting this (and who is behind the masks?) then they are no longer worthy of our trust, not only for those who are brown, but those who are liberal, those who don’t bend the knee to the king and his (incompetent) court, and those who have opinions.
By doing what he is doing, Trump is undermining our Police Departments, our Sheriff’s Departments, our Coast Guard, and soon, our Military. Dedicated people who put their lives on the line for us, are being infiltrated with $50K amateurs and zealous Proud Boy types, with the word “Police” written on their armor. So who is who?
Sheriffs, who put their deputies forth to join in this debacle, are also undermining the trust by the people. In many towns, these dedicated officers have worked diligently to gain the trust of the people in their assigned neighborhood, only to see that trust dissolve in an instant.
It’s shameful.
Sherry says
Right On Laurel!