President Donald Trump says he plans to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, telling Just the News that final documents are being prepared. The announcement comes days after Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a state-level proclamation labeling both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations, moves that supporters say target alleged ties to extremism and critics describe as unconstitutional and Islamophobic.
President Donald Trump has announced his intention to classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), saying his administration is moving ahead with a formal designation.
In an interview published Sunday by the news outlet Just the News, Trump said he will designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. "It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms," he said. "Final documents are being drawn," according to Just the News and multiple outlets that reported on the interview.
The president’s comments follow a move last week by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who issued a state-level proclamation designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as "foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations." Abbott’s November 18 proclamation bars the groups from buying or acquiring land in Texas and authorizes the state attorney general to seek their dissolution, according to Texas officials and local news reports. Abbott argued that the organizations are aligned with extremist ideology and accused them of seeking to impose Islamic law in ways that undermine U.S. legal norms.
In remarks released with the proclamation and cited by several outlets, Abbott asserted that "the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world.’" He further claimed that the groups’ alleged efforts to support terrorism abroad and to subvert U.S. laws through "violence, intimidation, and harassment" are unacceptable. Legal and civil rights groups have criticized the action, noting that only the U.S. Secretary of State can issue an official federal Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, and pointing out that neither CAIR nor the Muslim Brotherhood is currently listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. government.
CAIR, a prominent U.S.-based Muslim civil rights organization, has strongly rejected Abbott’s designation and, along with other Muslim advocacy groups, has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block the Texas proclamation. The lawsuit argues that the state’s action is unconstitutional and defamatory and contends that the proclamation violates free speech and property rights protections.
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, is an Islamist movement with branches, political parties and affiliated organizations across the Middle East and other regions. Some groups linked historically or ideologically to the Brotherhood, including Hamas, have been designated as terrorist organizations by the United States; Hamas’s 1988 charter described the group as "one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine." Western branches and affiliated organizations in Europe and North America have generally emphasized political and social activism and, in public statements, have condemned violence.
Debate over the Brotherhood’s intentions in the West has persisted for years. Some policy analysts and think tanks, such as the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), argue that the movement’s public rejection of violence in Western countries is often tactical. In one FDD analysis, the group writes that the Brotherhood tends to be more cautious than al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in deciding whether to embrace violence, in part because its branches seek to avoid direct confrontation with host governments and to preserve their ability to spread their ideology over time.
Separately, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) recently published a lengthy report examining the Muslim Brotherhood’s historical and ideological influence and its activities in North America. In announcing the study, ISGAP’s founding director, Dr. Charles Asher Small, described the Brotherhood as "not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project" that, in his view, adapts to Western political and legal systems while seeking to undermine them from within. Supporters of the Brotherhood and associated organizations dispute such characterizations, saying they exaggerate the group’s reach and equate conservative religious or political activism with extremism.
Trump’s pledge to pursue a formal U.S. terrorist designation for the Muslim Brotherhood revives a long-running policy debate in Washington. Previous efforts under his first administration, and under other presidents, encountered resistance inside the national security bureaucracy, in part because of the Brotherhood’s diffuse structure and because some of its branches have participated in electoral politics in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. A federal designation would require the State Department to determine that the group meets statutory criteria for Foreign Terrorist Organizations and would have wide-ranging implications for any entities deemed to be part of, or materially supporting, the Brotherhood.
As of now, the U.S. government lists certain groups with roots in or links to the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Hamas, as terrorist organizations, but it has not designated the Brotherhood as a whole. Trump’s comments indicate he is prepared to test that longstanding U.S. policy, even as state-level actions like Abbott’s Texas proclamation remain largely symbolic in federal law and are already facing court challenges.
