Phantom Threat

President Donald Trump and his acolytes have dubbed Portland, Oregon, a “war-ravaged” city, which is not a characterization you’d expect of a place where protesters seem more inclined as of recent to don inflatable Reptar costumes and dance to reggaeton than launch coordinated armed assaults on federal immigration detention centers.

Nevertheless, a dozen right-wing propagandists converged on the White House in October for a bizarre roundtable to tackle the existential threat posed by antifascists like those in Portland, who, in the words of Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, want “to destroy the American people and their way of life.” Kash Patel, the head of Trump’s FBI, called for a “whole-of-government” approach. Joining him were the likes of Andy Ngo, a propagandist who has defined his career around opposing antifascist organizing; Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump disinformation hustler with a history of collaborating with racist extremists; and Brandi Kruse, a YouTuber who quit her job at a Seattle Fox News affiliate to, among other things, speak truth to power about the malign influence of diversity initiatives. Nick Sortor, a pro-Trump livestreamer, held up a mangled American flag that he said he wrestled from the hands of a protester intent on burning it in Portland earlier in the week. “The Portland politicians are literally willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists. It’s sickening,” he groaned. “I’ve seen it firsthand, obviously.” He proceeded to describe his arrest on disorderly conduct charges following a scuffle with a left-wing protester over the American flag. (The charges were dropped less than a week later.)

For a roundtable of self-described experts, the group offered few insights into the impenetrable darkness of the left-wing mind, nor specific strategies for besting their common enemy. Each speaker highlighted their own experiences on the ground in protests but offered few details beyond their own grievances. One complained about not being invited to speak on CNN. Kruse spoke about what happened when she overcame “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” or TDS. “I’m happier. I’m healthier. More successful. I even think I got a little more attractive.” All seemed animated by a desire for revenge by any means necessary.

In the months since Tyler Robinson allegedly shot and killed right-wing activist Charlie Kirk during a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University, the pro-Trump right has accelerated its scorched earth war on the left. In late September, the president issued an executive order declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.” He followed with a separate national security policy memorandum—dubbed NSPM-7—directing federal law enforcement to quash political violence. It points to a handful of ideals that can be predictors of possible violence, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” support for overthrowing the government, “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” It tells Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs)—multi-agency partnerships between federal, state, and local law enforcement—to direct law enforcement resources to disrupting violence coming out of these networks. How these viewpoints are to be identified is anyone’s guess. But, as one former Department of Justice official put it, that appears to be the point.

“There’s a lot of ambiguity there. A lot of vagueness. And when you’ve got a vague pronouncement or executive order or NSPM—or whatever the case might be—that invites uncertainty,” Thomas Brzozowski, a former counsel for domestic terrorism within the national security division of the Department of Justice, told me. “Folks can’t know with any degree of certainty that what they might be undertaking or what they might be doing could be a basis for a potential investigation.”

Trump administration officials might have used Kirk’s murder as an excuse for doubling down on their own brand of McCarthyism, but the grisly, carnivalesque display of self-entitlement and grievance that fuels NSPM-7 and his administration’s anti-antifascism is nothing new. Here is, to paraphrase exiled German novelist Thomas Mann in 1939, a movement “possessed of a bottomless resentment and a festering desire for revenge.” Mann was referring to Hitler, whose “hysterical humbug and soul-paralyzing ideology” he acknowledged had catapulted him to “greatness.” No matter how expansive NSPM-7 and related policies may be, it might still be an insufficient vehicle for revenge in the minds of his supporters.

After Trump first announced his intent to run for office in 2015, some commentators, academics, and researchers turned to the intertwining concepts of grievance and resentment to theorize his rise and the desires of his supporters. They sought to provide an explanation for the seemingly abrupt shift from the allegedly “post-racial” Obama administration to Trump’s unapologetic white nationalism. Trump had “found a responsive audience in Americans who felt neglected by politics as usual,” wrote Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep in the 2019 book The Politics of Losing. He did so, they argued, by “identifying—through trial and error—sources of resentment.” While McVeigh and Estep focused on the resurgence of the white nationalist movement, others explored the ways in which these grievances and anxieties animated reactionary thought across the board. Pankaj Mishra’s Age Of Anger and Francis Fukuyama’s Identity described resentment as fueling nationalism and divisive identity politics, respectively. But to further plumb the depths of modern man’s hatred of one another, Mishra and others turned to the notion of ressentiment. While sometimes used interchangeably, ressentiment differs from “resentment” in its depth and distinct relationship to modern notions of equality and morality.

Nietzsche first popularized the concept of ressentiment through his discussion of the master-slave dynamic that he believed gave rise to the birth of modern morality. Derived from the French verb “to feel” or “to feel strongly,” ressentiment, for Nietzsche, remains untranslated. The concept is intertwined with slave morality, which Nietzsche sees as an inversion of the noble, aristocratic impulses that should constitute the “good.” “The man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself,” he wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals. He is weak and unable to change his circumstances. His ressentiment is a reaction—not just to his own failures but to the conditions of the world around him; it is, in short, a product of him listlessly ruminating on the successes of those around him and loathing their status. Max Scheler built on Nietzsche’s theory in his 1912 book Ressentiment, spinning it out into the realm of politics and social theory. Scheler described ressentiment as “a self-poisoning of the mind” with “quite definite causes and consequences.” Scheler imagined ressentiment as “a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature.” He saw it as endemic to modern societies, including liberal governments that had failed to uphold their promises to eradicate hierarchies, preserve fairness in terms of opportunities and resources, and uphold social equality.

As a means of psychoanalyzing the motivations of individual Trump voters, focusing on ressentiment comes off as a bit trite. Attributing Trump’s popularity to the psychological conditions of the masses who the intellectual elite perceive as misguided runs the risk of both trivializing its causes while lending weight to the right’s victimization narrative that it uses to justify its turn toward authoritarianism. Instead, political theorist Wendy Brown and others have talked about ressentiment as a force for reactionaries to seize upon for their own ends. “Part of what is bringing authoritarian nationalists to power is a mobilization of this ressentiment and transmuting the humiliation, the suffering, and the displacement that this group feels into a form of very powerful political xenophobia,” Brown said in a July 2025 interview published in Cultural Politics. To mobilize the ressentiment that feeds authoritarian movements requires social structures that can nurture it and channel it. This means, for instance, not merely attributing the persistence of misguided right-wing tropes such as “anti-white racism” to a grassroots movement that feels left behind by the gains of racial and ethnic minorities, as some commentators in the first Trump administration were wont to do. Instead, we should see these myths and their degenerate offspring—such as the hysterical conspiracy theory that immigrants eat pets—as having to do with the fact that the most powerful monied figures in right-wing politics and media chose to keep them alive.

Still, there’s some utility in using ressentiment to explain the particular brand of retribution that Trump’s movement peddles. What the ressentiment-driven populist right seeks, at least for Brown, is “revenge against the wound of nothingness by destroying the imagined agent of that wound.” This “imagined agent” could be enemies on the left, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, or just about anything other than the fragmentation and injustices that unbridled capitalism has inflicted on this country. Its fluidity makes for an ideal buttress to the authoritarianism embedded within NSPM-7. It doesn’t matter that the American left spends more time chasing off ICE agents by banging on pots or with flash mobs—not to mention fighting with itself. With enough conspiratorial flair, just about anyone can be a fire-breathing radical. 

Ressentiment, argued Scheler, “can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear.” To the extent that the administration’s attacks on the left, loosely defined, through NSPM-7 could be considered “suppressed,” it’s in the sense that, unlike the president’s Truth Social account, the document doesn’t accuse the left of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

But for civil society advocates, the broad strokes that NSPM-7 uses to describe its targets and its obvious disconnect from any clear-eyed analysis of political violence contribute to the threat it poses. In October, nearly three dozen Democratic lawmakers signed a letter calling NSPM-7 a threat to “civil liberties.” Led by Representatives Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Jared Huffman of California, and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the group accused the administration of using “ideologically charged language . . that invites enforcement based on an individual’s personal opinions or political beliefs rather than any objective concern for public safety.” It highlighted the memo’s language around “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity,” noting that the inclusion of both seemed likely to hamper lawful activism and dissent.

“It’s clear that this vague language seems to be setting up the administration to be able to go after social/racial justice organizations based on flimsy reasoning that is right out of the MAGA playbook,” Heidi Beirich, the cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told me. (In the interest of disclosure, Beirich and I both worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2019.) The attitudes that NSPM-7 declared as possible predictors of political violence had clear connections to different parts of the radical right, such as Christian nationalists or white nationalists who wrongly sought to portray advocates for anti-racism or standing up to LGBTQ+ right as extremists. “It’s an incredible radicalization of the conservative movement when it comes to racism and hate,” she added. Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, echoed similar concerns. “Federal agencies have already been escalating efforts to sow fear and intimidation. NSPM-7 is also intended to send a chill. That is its clear purpose.” Strangely, NSPM-7 has received minimal attention in the mainstream media.

While NSPM-7 implores JTTFs to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy” to combat political violence, it’s vague on specifics. So, too, is the administration’s declaration against the antifascist movement. For all its bluster, Brzozowski, the former domestic terrorism council at the Department of Justice, told me the order “doesn’t confer new investigative authorities to any particular agency.” Still, noted Beirich, it’s “frightening that JTTFs might add organizations doing . . . totally legitimate and legal work to their list of those they should be investigating or infiltrating.”

Nevertheless, NSPM-7 and Trump’s executive order appear to have already informed criminal charges and terrorism designations. Antifascist activists, who were arrested in July over their alleged involvement in a non-fatal shooting at an ICE facility in Texas, faced additional terrorism-related charges after Trump’s executive order and memorandum. In mid-November, five of the activists pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges in connection with the shooting. That same month, the State Department named four left-wing groups in Greece, Germany, and Italy first as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) and, subsequently, Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).

Only one—Antifa Ost, a German group—appears to be directly affiliated with antifascist organizing, while the others are mainly left-wing anarchist groups. The two designations facing these groups carry different weight. SDGTs are subject to sanctions and other financial penalties, as well as restrictions on travel. If a group is an FTO, the government can level harsh criminal penalties against those who provide what it deems “material support” and conduct much more significant and invasive surveillance. Often, FTOs are groups that have been responsible for direct attacks on the United States and U.S. officials or pose real national security threats to the country, such as al-Qaeda.

“It’s not clear whether the Trump administration is actively misrepresenting antifa for its political purposes or is completely clueless, but the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle,” Mark Bray, a history professor at Rutgers University who studies antifascism, told me when I asked him about the designations. “Antifa is not a single organization with a leadership and massive funding structure. Rather, it is a loose, flexible term for a broader decentralized politics of opposition from below. There is very little money in the movement, and what there is comes from members of groups or is crowdfunded.”

Compare that to the $29 million that Osama bin Laden said he left in his will after U.S. forces assassinated him.

After a video of the Portland protesters in costumes found their way onto Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the tactic spread to other cities. And so, too, did the right’s rage. Outside of an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois—a suburb of Chicago—reporters filmed a procession featuring Cookie Monster, a penguin, a cow, and Winnie the Pooh. In a video that Oliya Scootercaster of Freedom News TV posted to X, the group of inflatable animals wandered through the protest as demonstrators shouted, “This is what democracy looks like.”

Not everyone found the animal parade humorous. Andy Ngo accused the costume-wearing animals of “working with . . . violent Antifa.” “You’ve seen how violent the far-left extremists have been against ICE in Broadview, Ill.,” he posted on X, “They are highly organized and now, learning from the left-wing propaganda in Portland, have purchased their own animal costumes to whitewash the violence in Chicago.”

What “violence” Ngo is referring to is unclear. A lawsuit that the ACLU in Illinois recently filed against the Trump administration on behalf of journalists, nonprofit news organizations, and protesters present at Broadview alleged that federal law enforcement have repeatedly, and violently, violated their rights. In a complaint filed less than a week after Ngo’s X post, lawyers accused agents of engaging in “a pattern of extreme brutality in a concerted and ongoing effort to silence the press and civilians.” As for the character of the protests, the same document describes them as “animated but peaceful.”

It may seem strange to call the administration weak. Trump won the majority of the popular vote and the electoral college in 2024. Republicans won or maintained majorities in the House and the Senate, leaving the Democrats in the first few months of the administration looking dazed and confused as Trump’s cronies took a chainsaw to the bureaucratic state. Polls measuring Trump’s approval rating in late November show anywhere between 35 to 49 percent of respondents look upon him favorably. The economy hasn’t crashed—yet. He’s delivered on one of his more draconian campaign promises: the administration says it has deported over 400,000 people, in addition to 1.6 million who it described as “voluntarily self-deported.” Even after Kirk’s murder, the president’s supporters spoke of victory in the spiritual battle that they perceived to be ongoing. “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, avowed during Kirk’s spectacular memorial-cum-campaign rally at a football stadium in Arizona.

But the manner with which Trump-aligned media and influencers have come to cover the left smacks of anything but strength. Tune into any pro-Trump stream, and the message is clear: you need to be afraid. “They”—the menacing, devious phantasm that haunts the right-wing man of ressentiment—are still coming for you. It’s why “they” call you “nazis,” as J.D. Vance and others have claimed. It’s why “they” receive awards from universities; as Mike Cernovich wrote of Angela Davis receiving an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University, “they want to murder us all.” “They literally want us dead,” Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, told Alex Jones on an episode of his show in mid-October. “If they get back in power, they will use it against us.”

This is the “rancor and rage,” to paraphrase Brown, of a movement terrified of its loss of position, of status. Trump reentered office saying the American people granted him a “historic mandate” in order to justify his draconian efforts to expel migrants, clamp down on dissent, tear apart the administrative state, and whitewash the 2021 insurrection. These are moves intended to inspire anxiety and dread. “We have to recognize and call out the administration’s fearmongering and abuse of the already fraught and discriminatory terrorism label,” Shamsi of the ACLU told me, “And across civil society, we have to double down on the First Amendment-protected activism that reflects the vibrancy of this country.”