White House Releases 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy May 6, Sebastian Gorka Promotes Blueprint

The White House released its 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy on May 6 as a 16-page document promoted for months by White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, who said he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint.

“For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U”

Alternet

ProPublica reported the finished product is “a 16-page, typo-sprinkled document” that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts.

Alternet

The strategy’s framing, as described by ProPublica, places Islamist militant groups second to Latin American drug cartels and portrays militant leftists as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida.

ProPublica also said the violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, “doesn’t merit a mention,” while the document includes a line that “A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged.”

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said, “What it tells me is that this administration is not paying attention to the data,” in a critique cited by ProPublica.

The Intercept, in turn, described the strategy as “a new declaration of war on the Trump administration’s enemies — foreign and domestic, real and imagined,” and said it targets immigrants, legal observers, activists, protesters, and the press.

Foreign Policy

The Intercept quoted Sebastian Gorka explaining the strategy as “common-sense counterterrorism based on reality not fake threats,” while Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., called it “a plan on how they’re going to attack people on the left.”

The Intercept also said the document formalizes three major types of terror groups—“Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists”—and defined that last group as people the administration deems “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

Truthout said the May 6 strategy expands the Trump administration’s war on progressives and builds on a memo issued last September called the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”

“For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U”

ProPublica

Truthout quoted Hina Shamsi of the ACLU National Security Project writing that NSPM-7 is “a deliberate attempt to sow fear and intimidate and silence opposition to the president’s abuses,” while also saying it “contains nothing that we have not seen before.”

Truthout reported that the memo directs the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to root out what it calls “domestic terrorist organizations,” while arguing there is no official label or designation regime for so-called domestic terrorism.

The Intercept added that Gorka said the strategy will not permit “the most powerful national security tools in the world including the counterterrorism enterprise to be used as political weapons,” as criticism from lawmakers and civil-liberties groups centers on who could be swept into the administration’s domestic threat framework.