Trump counterterrorism strategy names 'transgender ideologies' as major threat

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, May 12, 2026

The Trump administration has warned that “radically pro-transgender” advocacy groups constitute a major terror threat as the Trump administration works to roll back actions of the Biden administration that it maintains “weaponized” the intelligence community. 

The White House released the United States Counterterrorism Strategy for 2026 last week. The document identified three major types of terrorist groups that pose a threat to American society: Narcoterrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamic terrorists and violent left-wing extremists such as anarchists and antifascists. 

“In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT [counterterrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the document states. “We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”

The document identifies the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk “by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies” in September 2025 as an example of “the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists.” Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter who took Kirk’s life, was in a relationship with his trans-identified male roommate at the time of the assassination. 

Other examples of these types of attacks include the August 2025 mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which resulted in two casualties, and the March 2023 mass shooting at Covenant Presbyterian School in Nashville, Tennessee, that left six dead. The perpetrator of the Minneapolis shooting was a trans-identified male named Robert Westman, while the Nashville school shooting was carried out by Audrey Hale, a trans-identified female. 

The inclusion of “violent left-wing extremists” in the counterterrorism strategy marks the latest example of the Trump administration taking action against violent, far-left activist groups. In September 2025, Trump designated Antifa as a terrorist organization. 

In addition to naming “violent left-wing extremists” as one of the most pressing threats in the U.S., the U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy condemned the weaponization of the intelligence community during the Biden administration. “Our nation has not been well served by its Intelligence Community (IC), which has been mired in old ways of looking at threats, or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool,” the report stated. 

“Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at schoolboard meetings, Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates, this Administration will continue to prohibit the IC from being used politically against innocent Americans,” the document vowed. 

One of the incidents listed as an example of the weaponization of the intelligence community involved the distribution of an internal memo in the FBI’s Richmond Field Office in January 2023 under the Biden administration, alleging that “the increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology almost certainly presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development.” 

Following backlash to the document, the FBI released a statement insisting that the memo “does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI” and worked to remove it from circulation. Last year, the Trump administration also cut ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was cited as a source in an appendix listing examples of radical-traditionalist Catholic groups accompanying the January 2023 memo.

The Biden administration also faced pushback after then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff” in an October 2021 memo that was distributed five days after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) requested “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators.” 

The NSBA likened concerned parents descending on school board meetings nationwide to protest school policies related to COVID-19 as well as the promotion of LGBT ideology in school curriculum to enablers of “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” This prompted several state affiliates of the NSBA to cut ties with the organization.