President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he will be formally designating the far-left Anarcho-Communist group Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.
The announcement comes after nearly a week of violent riots in response to the death of George Floyd, an African-American man who died in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Although initially concentrated to the city of Minneapolis, riots quickly expanded over the weekend to numerous major cities across the country, including Washington D.C., Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
As the riots heated up on Saturday, President Trump tweeted that the culprits were “Antifa and the Radical Left.” Attorney General William Barr similarly pointed out that the rioters and looters were engaging in “Antifa-like tactics.”
The ostensibly “anti-fascist” group was formed in protest of Trump’s election to the presidency, having repeatedly and falsely labeled the president as a fascist, and has been responsible for many violent riots in the last several years, including riots on the day of President Trump’s inauguration and the deadly Charlottesville rally in August of 2017.The latest round of riots, which have seen thousands of businesses burned to the ground, hundreds of injuries, and several deaths, have been primarily carried out by Antifa and the far-left group Black Lives Matter. Democrats and some in the media have tried to pin the blame on “white supremacists” and far-right groups, with no evidence to back up their claims.