Blue State Governors Are Rolling Over for Trump’s FBI

We asked Democratic leaders what they’re doing to prevent the president’s Orwellian attacks on political speech. Their answers were not heartening.

In a survey of every Democratic governor in America, not a single state leader told The New Republic that they would move to dismantle state and local police participation in the FBI task forces carrying out investigations into political speech and organizing. Of 24 governors contacted, only two gave The New Republic extensive answers about Trump’s executive order criminalizing speech and protest, and the FBI entities carrying out these orders. 

In 2025, Donald Trump released National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive instructing the departments of State, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security to pursue a dramatic effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” The memorandum also instructs the attorney general to submit a list of groups and entities deemed to be domestic terrorists to the president. 

Among the many indicators of the new violent domestic threat in NSPM-7 are “anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The mechanism for investigating and prosecuting these new thought crimes is a post-9/11 invention that fuses the FBI with state police, local police, the National Guard, DHS, military intelligence components, and sometimes even the CIA into a Joint Terrorism Task Force, or  JTTF. A national network of over 200 JTTFs was expanded through the justification of preventing the intelligence-sharing gaps that allowed hijackers to attack the twin towers on 9/11. 

In the intervening years, JTTFs have been used to deputize state and local police into federal agents, injecting federal directives like NSPM-7 directly into local communities. A study........

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