Why Trump Is So Obsessed With Antifa

The president strategically invokes the group in his speeches to stoke
fear and shift discourse away from systemic racism.
Ben Zimmer
June 4, 2020
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Donald Trump has used the Nixonian vocabulary of �law and order� to paint
himself as a bulwark against a descent into anarchy.Getty / The Atlantic

This nation has been roiled with anguish and anger this past week over the
police and extrajudicial killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and
Ahmaud Arbery, and yet the White House is engaging in the same old
rhetorical tactics of divisive scapegoating. Only now that rhetoric comes
in the service of ominous ends: President Donald Trump relies on the
shadowy specter of �antifa��a label for a diffuse militant movement
unified by a drive to counter fascism through direct action�to evoke fear
in the American people. Since his inaugural speech and its dark focus on
�American carnage,� Trump has used the Nixonian vocabulary of �law and
order� to paint himself as a bulwark against a descent into anarchy. Now
he is manufacturing bogeymen.

As usual, the tweets came first. After railing against the �THUGS� of
Minneapolis, Trump on Sunday praised the National Guard�s response in the
city the previous night: �The ANTIFA led anarchists, among others, were
shut down quickly.� Twenty minutes later, he declared on Twitter, �The
United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist
Organization��despite the fact that, as many observers have pointed out,
the president has no legal authority to designate domestic terrorist
groups. And antifa, short for �antifascist,� isn�t even a distinct
organization with central leadership, but rather a loose confederation of
like-minded activists, often acting anonymously.
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Read: The double standard of the American riot

When Trump invokes antifa, he infuses the word with a vaguely foreign-
sounding otherness, heightened by the fact that he never expands it to its
full form, antifascist�a strategic, or at least convenient, omission that
serves to detach the name from the group�s stated beliefs. That would
complicate the simplistic dichotomy that Trump and his allies have been
constructing, between right-leaning patriots and the far-left extremists
who must be to blame for any violent eruption. By latching on to a
nebulous and under-defined term such as antifa, Trump can ascribe all
manner of ills to a scapegoat that shifts to satisfy his needs at the
moment.

Trump doubled down in his remarks in the Rose Garden on Monday by
enumerating a panoply of malefactors: �Our nation has been gripped by
professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals,
rioters, Antifa, and others.� The organizers of �domestic terror,� he
said, were now �on notice,� and �this includes Antifa and others who are
leading instigators of this violence.� Though some activists who identify
with the antifa movement may very well have taken part in recent
demonstrations, The Nation reports that the FBI�s Washington field office
�has no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence� in the D.C.-
area protests on May 31, according to internal documents. While inveighing
against �Antifa,� Trump elided the violence that set off the protests in
the first place: the police brutality that took the life of Floyd, just as
it has imperiled the lives of other black Americans.

This kind of attempt to shift the political discourse away from issues of
systemic racism has long been a hallmark of Trumpian rhetoric. The
president�s response to the Unite the Right rally of white supremacists in
Charlottesville, Virginia, which descended into violence nearly three
years ago, notoriously included the false equivalence that there were
�very fine people on both sides.� (It was a white nationalist who drove a
car into a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters, killing the 32-year-old
Heather Heyer.) Antifa first entered his personal lexicon at a campaign
rally in Phoenix on August 22, 2017, a week and a half after
Charlottesville, where he said, �You know, they show up in the helmets and
the black masks, and they�ve got clubs and they�ve got everything,� before
blurting out �Antifa!� Since then Trump has returned to the term often in
speeches, reciting �an-tee-fah,� as he pronounces it, with an air of alien
menace.

Read: Don�t fall for the �chaos� theory of the protests

Both antifa and antifascist are, in fact, designations with extremely
complex and commonly misunderstood histories, as explored in Mark Bray�s
2017 book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Bray gives the pronunciation
as an-tee-fa, reflecting the word�s origins in a number of European
languages, including German, where it abbreviated the noun Antifaschismus
or the adjective antifaschistisch. As Bray explains, antifa was first used
in Germany in the 1930s for a militant movement opposing the Nazi regime,
and �Antifa committees� emerged toward the end of World War II with a
revolutionary socialist bent. The modern antifa movement grew out of the
punk scene in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when young
leftists clashed with neo-Nazi skinheads.

On the American scene, the appellation antifa is fairly new, but
antifascist has its own particular historical resonances, dating back to
the 1930s when fascist organizations such as Friends of New Germany and
the German American Bund were on the rise. In left-wing circles, those who
had fought in the Spanish Civil War�s Lincoln Brigade, serving with the
Loyalists against Francisco Franco, had antifascist bona fides. In 1943,
however, reports emerged that Americans who had fought alongside the
Spanish Loyalists were being persecuted by government officials for
suspected communist leanings. One newspaper article at the time explained
that the Army had discriminated against a Spanish Civil War veteran, using
the bureaucratic explanation that he was �politically unreliable� and
�prematurely anti-Fascist.� The peculiar label �premature anti-fascist�
got even more attention that year when a congressional committee sought to
root out subversives from the government and treated veterans of the
Lincoln Brigade as suspect.

The current scapegoating of antifa has historical echoes in other
countries as well. I checked in with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor
at NYU and the author of the forthcoming book Strongmen: From Mussolini to
the Present, who recently tweeted a quote from Mussolini referring to
antifascists and other �degenerates� in 1927: �We remove these individuals
from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person.� �During
Italian fascism,� Ben-Ghiat told me via email, �when they needed to wipe
out the political opposition, antifascists were first treated as
terrorists and a special tribunal was created, as well as a special
political police, to deal with them. At times they were lumped together
with other �degenerates� like alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally
ill, and others who were viewed as deficient and unable to be redeemed and
normalized by the state.�

Other right-wing regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet�s in Chile, declared
�wartime� as �a continuing state of exception,� in which �the left were
treated as terrorists and counter-insurgency methods were used against
them,� Ben-Ghiat said. This was accompanied by a �moral discourse of
healing the nation,� in which �the terrorist� is treated as a moral and
political sickness. Ben-Ghiat sees similar rhetoric extending from
Mussolini to Franco to Pinochet up to present-day regimes such as that of
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Trump�s Rose Garden speech bore all of these authoritarian hallmarks. It
used protests over grave injustices merely as a pretext for an aggressive
militaristic stance against the country�s own citizens�any of whom might
now be branded as �domestic terrorists� by the state. Being alert to how
language can be weaponized in this way is a necessary step in
deconstructing Trump�s would-be strongman act.