Trump has already said he planned to designate Antifa as domestic terrorists. Some are opposed to such a move, like this article from RAND.
One problem with that report; its author says at present the US only has a Foreign Terrorist Organisation list and "Antifa does not clearly meet the definition of the F, the T, or the O."
Since when?
Foreign: They are not American, it's an international movement following the same principles, waving the same flag and wearing the same identifying marks.
Terrorist: They've been using violence to silence political opposition for years. It is their entire raison d'etre. And if the past week hasn't show someone that they've escalated to killing people, that person's motivations are suspect.
Organization: These people don't suddenly appear in crowds through sheer happenstance. They coordinate activities online and have the same loose cell-based structure that all terrorist groups do.
The RAND article is a joke; hopefully someone in the Executive and/or Homeland will have more grit.
I didn't mean to suggest a new Patriot Act or anything else open-ended. I'm purely talking about using executive orders under the existing National Emergency Act to target Antifa specifically. Every President uses (abuses?) this law to introduce emergencies that allow them to effectively bypass Congress on security issues. The increased tension, rioting and violence in the lead up to an election could be used to justify such a move and in its scope targeting specific entities should be possible.
I completely agree that the current intel chiefs can't be trusted and both they and Congress would take any wiggle room they can get to rip off a few extra civil rights. Even with a very limited designation you can be sure that they'd try to use that as a precedent to target other groups, so its not ideal, but something should be done to target the little brownshirts before they actually start making (effective) bombs or carrying out mass shootings (as opposed to now were its just crude IEDs and individual shooting attacks). If Trump wins in November the escalation is guaranteed and if you wait too long to crack down you end up with a hard core of dedicated militants who use the casuals as a network for funding, transport, intelligence, etc. Hit them now and drive the causals away with the fear of God and the hard-core have a much harder time building any robust operational network.
I still wouldn't do it. The National Security state should be broken up, not refined or re-directed. There's no way to trust that such an effort would go well, nor would it be helpful to allow the president to rule by so many executive orders.
I'd much rather just further break the system down and take the risks.
That's not gonna work. They're already well organized, funded, and supplied by international organizations. You're talking about taking a war to globalists... who are currently the ones with significant influence in the National Security state.
What's going to happen in late 2020 into 2021 is that there will be a likely Trump landslide with a giant public preference cascade which will reverse the tide publicly on a lot of this shit. However, the communists won't tolerate it and the mainstream media won't get the memo in time before the communists blow up a federal building and kill 500 people. Then we'll all get to watch Don Lemon claim that the real victims of the attack were Trump's victims from (insert orange-man-bad policy), and that this is the natural consequence of Trump's victims yearning for freedom and peace. Queue violent blowback from the overwhelming majority of normies, and the corporatists will start purging the radical left and try to make a deal with Trump.
I've been right so far.