How Trump changed what “terrorism” means

The State Department designated Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) on Monday as part of an escalating campaign aimed at forcing President Nicolás Maduro from power. The designation comes amid an ongoing campaign of US strikes on suspected drug boats that has killed more than 80 people, the largest build-up of US military forces in the Caribbean in decades, and the news that President Donald Trump has authorized covert action within Venezuela.

The designation of Cartel de los Soles — which the US says is led by Maduro himself alongside other high-ranking Venezuelan officials and military officers — “brings a whole bunch of new options to the United States,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said last week.

From a legal perspective, it’s not clear what options he’s talking about. FTO designation brings with it a range of penalties, including economic sanctions and visa bans, but it does not authorize military action. Trump has used it that way in the past, however; in his first term, his administration controversially designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization shortly before assassinating its commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in a drone strike. So it’s not far-fetched to interpret Monday’s move as laying the groundwork for military action against targets on Venezuelan soil, or even against Maduro himself, since the designation considers him the lead “narcoterrorist.”

“The concern is that what they’re doing is dressing up regime change under the guise of counterterrorism and counternarcotics,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser now with the International Crisis Group, told Vox.

It’s also another example of the unusual way that this administration is using the label “terrorism” very differently from how it was used in the years when fighting terrorist groups was America’s top national security priority.

Cartel de los Soles is not what would normally be described as a terrorist organization, nor is it even an “organization” at all. It’s a term Venezuelans use to describe a loose network of Venezuelan military officers and regime figures (“Soles” refers to the stars on generals’ uniforms) involved in a range of criminal activity that includes drug trafficking.

But since Inauguration Day, the administration has been casting a very wide net with these designations. Trump’s State Department has designated 24 groups as foreign terrorist organizations this year — more than the US designated in the previous 10 years. The groups named in 2025 alone now comprise nearly a third of the total groups on the list.

Four of the Trump targets have been Iran-aligned militia groups (including Yemen’s Houthis, who had been removed under the Biden administration), but the vast majority have been Latin American criminal organizations, including Mexican drug cartels, and gangs from Haiti, Venezuela, and Ecuador. For the administration, these all fall under the category of “narcoterrorism,” which is not a new term but has been wielded to an unprecedented extent by this administration, blurring the lines between criminal and military threats.

The deaths and misery caused by drug addiction are undoubtedly a major issue, and foreign criminal groups undoubtedly play a role in supplying the drugs. But the administration’s rhetoric about which groups are transporting which drugs has been highly misleading, and many experts believe focusing exclusively on the international dimension of the opioid epidemic can distract from efforts to counteract the demand for drugs. In any event, groups supplying drugs to Americans with drug addiction for money do not pose the same sort of threat as those plotting violent attacks for the sake of politics or ideology.

The action in Trump’s new war on terror isn’t all in the Western Hemisphere: This month, it also designated four European left-wing extremist groups under the auspices of its campaign against “antifa” terrorism. The four groups — from Italy, Germany, and Greece — have also been credibly accused of violent attacks, though it’s not clear how active they still are. It seems unlikely that the German antifa group known as the “Hammer Gang” for attacking neo-Nazi rallies with hammers would be considered a major US national security priority under any other administration.

In the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Trump also designated America’s antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, though there’s no such legal category. Moreover, antifa is less of a defined organization than a catch-all term for an ideological persuasion.

“We’re in legal la-la land,” Finucane said.

One irony of Trump’s anti-“terrorism” blitz is that it comes as the US has largely turned the page from the post-9/11 War on Terrorism. It’s almost hard to remember now what a prominent political issue the global fight against groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS was during Trump’s initial rise to political power and in the early years of his first term.

Jihadist terrorism will still sometimes garner the administration’s attention — when it dovetails with a culture war priority, such as allegations that Somalis in Minnesota are funding al-Shabaab, or Trump’s threat to use military force to protect Nigerian Christians from Boko Haram. But developments like the resurgence of ISIS in Syria, as well as the news that al-Qaeda may be on the verge of taking over the capital of Mali, have attracted little notice in today’s Washington.

Notably, the one group that Trump took off the foreign terrorists list is the al-Nusra Front, which was once al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. The longtime leader of that group, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is now the president of Syria and met with Trump at the White House earlier this month. This would have been a hard scene to imagine back in 2016, when Trump suggested the US should ally with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to fight jihadists like Sharaa.

The days when “bombing the shit” out of terrorist groups ISIS and al-Qaeda was a top priority for Trump are long gone. But the US is still dropping bombs, and “terrorism” is still a useful label for the administration to apply to its enemies, foreign and domestic, even if it’s less clear what it means today.