National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, is a presidential directive that for the first time appears to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs. You've probably heard a lot about President Donald Trump's many executive orders. But as an international relations scholar who has studied U.S. foreign policy decision-making and national security legislation, I recognize that presidents can take several types of executive actions without legislative involvement: executive orders, memoranda and proclamations. This seventh national security memorandum from the Trump White House pushes the limits of presidential authority by targeting individuals and groups as potential domestic terrorists based on their beliefs rather than their actions. Unlike executive orders, they are not required to be published. When these memoranda, like NSPM-7, relate to national security and military and foreign policy, they are called national security directives, although the specific name of these directives changes with each administration....

Donald Trump's Justice Department is firing some of the nation's most experienced counterterrorism prosecutors and experts, apparently for political reasons. Line prosecutors and terrorism experts across the country are watching with alarm, although many are afraid to say so publicly. On Wednesday night, the department pushed out Michael Ben'Ary, who was head of national security at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. He lost his job, CNN reported, because a MAGA activist had falsely accused him of resisting the recent indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. (Ben'Ary was not involved in the case, the network found.) As a prosecutor, Ben'Ary took an oath 'that requires you to follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, free from fear or favor, and unhindered by political interference,' he wrote to colleagues on Friday. 'In recent months, the political leadership of the Department have violated these principles, jeopardizing our national security and making American citizens less safe.'...

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing, the Republican policy apparatus went immediately to work. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Project, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate 'Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,' or TIVE, as a domestic terrorism threat category. The push comes as President Donald Trump just signed an executive order that seeks to mobilize federal law enforcement against vaguely defined domestic terror networks. The Heritage Foundation and Oversight Project document, which defines 'transgender ideology' as 'a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable," grounds its policy recommendations in a startling claim: 'Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.' When WIRED asked for the data behind this claim, the Oversight Project did not respond; the Heritage Foundation pointed to a tweet from one of its vice presidents, Roger Severino, claiming that '50% of major (non-gang) school shootings since 2015' involve a transgender shooter or trans-related motive. Severino also lays out what appears to be his entire dataset: eight shootings, four of which, he claims, involve 'a trans-identifying shooter and/or a likely trans-ideology related motivation.'...

Condemnation of U.S. interventionism against Brazil and Israeli action in the Gaza Strip have long been part of the rhetoric of the veteran leftist leader. So too has been the need to fight global hunger and speak up for global environmental initiatives. But, besides those expected major themes, Lula's speech also embarked on new territory, noticeably on the issue of organized crime and terrorism. 'It is worrying to equate crime with terrorism,' Lula noted. Such conflation has been part of Trump's agenda since the very first day of his second administration. On Jan. 20, 2025, he signed an executive order that ordered the inclusion of Latin American organized crime groups on the list of designated terrorist organizations. As a result, entities like Venezuela's Tren de Aragua, Ecuador's Los Choneros, Mexico's Cartel de Sinaloa and El Salvador's Mara Salvatrucha now share space with Boko Haram and the Islamic State group on the State Department's list of 'Foreign Terrorist Organizations.' The association between drug trafficking and terrorism is not new in U.S. foreign policy. In the 1980s, groups like Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the Medellin Cartel in Colombia were classified as 'narco-terrorists' because they fought their own governments using weapons funded by cocaine trafficking....