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On Monday, the FBI announced a new task force to crack down on what Elon Musk has described as “evil attacks” against Tesla vehicles and facilities. “This is domestic terrorism,” director Kash Patel wrote of the more than 80 instances of vandalism, arson, and gunfire that have targeted Musk’s signature cars since January. Patel was joining a chorus of such statements from Trump officials. On March 20, Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to use the full force of the Justice Department against anyone who joined “this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties.” On March 21, the FBI urged the public to “to look out for suspicious activity” around Tesla-related buildings. And during an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, Bondi accused Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of “promoting violence” for telling a virtual gathering of Tesla boycotters that she wanted “Elon to be taken down,” even though it was clear she was referring to his money.
The car attacks, while not legal, have not physically harmed anyone — usually a component of what we think of as a terrorist attack. But because “domestic terrorism” is so loosely defined under federal law, Trump and Musk have been able to manipulate it to serve their ends. By expanding the definition to encompass everything from graffiti to partisan speech, the administration has recast what have typically been misdemeanors and First Amendment activity as 9/11-in-miniature. And they are not the first to do so: Trump & Co. are borrowing from a playbook that has already allowed local municipalities to charge people who have not injured anyone with terrorist offenses — a chilling portent for everyday Americans who have so far been spared from Trump’s weaponization of the justice system.
In 2018, after years of protests and riots linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, Republicans in Georgia were eager for new ways to criminalize protests more easily. They passed a law expanding the legal definition of domestic terrorism to include damaging certain types of property. All of a sudden, breaking a window near a political demonstration — which in the past would have earned a “criminal damage to property” charge or something similar, according to civil-rights attorney Tiffany Roberts — could be prosecuted as terrorism. Furthermore, the legal dragnet was widened so that even someone in the vicinity of politically coded property destruction could be labeled a terrorist, too.
Which is exactly what happened in 2021, when activists from around the world converged on the region to stop a proposed police training facility dubbed Cop City. Amid the ensuing clashes, protesters threw rocks at cops and set fire to construction equipment — providing local authorities with the perfect opportunity to trial-balloon Georgia’s new anti-terrorism law. By Christmas 2022, cops had arrested five people for alleged domestic terrorism. “Why is an individual from Los Angeles, California, concerned about a training facility being built in the state of Georgia?” asked the assistant chief of the Atlanta Police Department at the time. “And that is why we consider that domestic terrorism.”
Atlanta has since become a laboratory for manufacturing alleged terrorists who do not actually terrorize. When militants set fire to more construction equipment, cops simply began arresting whoever was in the general area, claiming that anyone with mud on their shoes was probably fleeing and therefore guilty. This round of arrests — carried out by Democratic-run law-enforcement agencies, it is worth noting — formed the basis for the massive, 42-defendant domestic-terrorism indictment filed by Georgia’s Republican attorney general that September, which is still pending to this day.
The influence of Georgia Republicans is all over the Trump administration’s modus operandi. You can scarcely throw a rock at a gathering of progressives these days without hitting a supposed terrorist. Even though federal law does not allow the Department of Justice to charge people with domestic terrorism specifically, the law is already being contorted to justify arresting and deporting noncitizen activists for exercising their free-speech rights, such as Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestine green-card holder about whom Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Troy Edgar told NPR, “If he would have declared he’s a terrorist, we would have never let him in.”
The administration’s list of alleged terrorists seems likely to keep growing — as with the Tuesday addition of Ruymesa Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student who wrote a pro-Palestine op-ed and is now being held in ICE custody for “glorifying and supporting terrorism,” according to a DHS spokesperson. Similarly, as an act of acquiescence to Trump, Washington, D.C., is considering charging alleged Tesla vandals with hate crimes.
Meanwhile, the administration has been silent about more recognizable acts of terrorism that align with Trump’s ideological goals. According to Joan Donovan, an organizer of the Tesla Takedown movement, “Musk has developed his own private army of networked harassers, who are calling me a domestic terrorist for picketing Tesla.” The tenor of this picketing is anything but terroristic. Many of the protesters appear to be retirees who are eager to recapture the energy of the heyday of the resistance. But that is not how Trumpists are being trained to see them. The insistence that they are domestic terrorists is the sort of blanket propagandizing impressionable Trump supporters can be trusted to act on.
Sure enough, on Saturday, shortly after the FBI issued its warning about subversive activities near Tesla facilities, a group of about 100 protesters from the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Palm Beach County, Florida, was picketing on the sidewalk outside a local Tesla dealership when a man driving a black Nissan SUV drove by and started screaming at them. Suddenly, the driver jumped the curb, forcing several protesters to move out of his way to avoid being hit — an act of intimidation that called to mind recent vehicular terrorist attacks, like the one in New Orleans on January 1.
The 44-year-old driver, Andrew Dutil, reportedly exited the vehicle and walked into the dealership, where, one of the employees later told investigators, he announced that he “supports Tesla” and left. Dutil was arrested by local sheriff’s deputies and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. But one of the looming crises of the Trump era is that it is not totally clear, between Dutil and the picketers, who is more likely to be considered a terrorist.
