Trump Tilts at Fraud and Antifa Windmills for Last Ditch Summer Blockbuster
Oh dear.
June 20, 2026
Trump’s Summer Blockbuster: Bustin’ Antifa
TLDR
In the same way Orion Pictures desperately needed the 1990 Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane to be THE summer movie 36 years ago, the Trump administration is rolling out what it hopes will be a massive summer hit.
It's called Bustin' Antifa, and the bloated Dirty Harry plotline is more of the same from the administration’s previous schlock.
They’ve mixed some “Hey look, FRAUD!” jump scares, but this iteration has even more low effort hack work (literally going after an activist because they wore a sweatshirt that said, “I’m ANTIFA!”) is really just phoning it in at this point, right?).
The main plot device is a counterterrorism force called "Vanguard" that has been empowered to use your tax dollars to investigate and prosecute "anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity."
The "FRAUD!" taskforce plot runs on parallel lines, and is a convoluted mess, because there’s an unresolved tension from the main characters obviously and desperately hoping no one else gets in power to investigate the fraud they themselves are perpetuating in the name of investigating fraud.
In short: a mess. But . . . it just might work!
What?
Here’s the basic rundown of the plot:
On June 9, a federal grand jury in Georgia indicted two Cop City protesters, Katie Kloth, 39, and Tyler Norman, 42, on arson charges tied to a May 2022 protest at the Cobb County headquarters of Brasfield & Gorrie, then the Cop City training center's general contractor.
The Justice Department said the case is part of a nationwide National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 initiative led by Joint Task Force Vanguard. Xavier T. de Janon, an attorney representing a co-defendant in the related state case, said the instruction after NSPM-7 was for FBI offices nationwide to revisit old files, especially ones involving "Antifa," and bring new indictments.
Then, up in Minnesota, on June 16, federal prosecutors unsealed a 94-page indictment against 15 people tied to Direct Action Minnesota (formerly Twin Cities Direct Action) and the Black Cat Workers Collective, charging them with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers over blockades at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on Jan. 23 and March 1.
Twelve were arrested in Tuesday raids, one, Kyle Wagner, was already in custody on a February cyberstalking charge, and investigators are still trying to track down the other two.
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen tied the case to NSPM-7 and Joint Task Force Vanguard, but he was notably careful to frame the charges as conduct, not ideology. The defendants, he said, were charged “not for what they said, but for what they did.” What they did, according to the indictment, is post a devil emoji about an ICE car with a flat tire, use Signal, and wear a sweatshirt that read "I'm Antifa!"
When one defendant shared a link to the administration's counterterrorism strategy — the one we covered last month — another wrote back in the group chat, quoting the strategy's own description of its targets almost word for word: "My new bio: anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
The indictment has more than 200 versions of this type of nonsense.
Of 36 similar federal cases brought against Operation Metro Surge protesters, 18 have been dropped before trial (three with prejudice) and 11 more effectively dropped through non-prosecution agreements, which is, as we’ve seen with other types of SLAPP suits and lawfare, all part of the strategy.
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Ohio’s voter-fraud investigation follows the same pattern: a years-old, already-reviewed complaint resurfacing as a new federal operation.
On June 11, roughly 125 FBI agents raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a nonpartisan group that runs voter registration drives and ballot campaigns, fanning out to canvassers' homes across the state.
People interviewed by agents described the inquiry as related to "voter fraud," but since the initial story broke, Cuyahoga County election officials confirmed federal agents had already investigated an OOC-linked canvassing firm, Black Fork Strategies , in February of last year, following county-level complaints about registrations dating back to 2022.
Cuyahoga's deputy elections director, Tony Kaloger, a Republican, said the firm's irregularities looked like sloppy canvassers chasing a quota, not fraud, and that his office never found evidence anyone actually voted illegally. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, also a Republican, mocked Democrats for calling the investigation political, then posted a photo of himself shaking FBI Director Kash Patel's hand .
The raid is the latest in a string of actions stemming from a March 2025 Trump directive ordering DOJ and DHS to review voter rolls for noncitizens, most notably in Georgia, when, on Jan. 28, the FBI raided the Fulton County elections office and seized 2020 ballots, voter rolls, and tabulation records.
The investigation came from a referral by Kurt Olsen, a former "Stop the Steal" lawyer now serving as the White House's Director of Election Security and Integrity. NPR reported the affidavit left out earlier state findings that had already debunked the fraud claims.
So What?
None of this week's casework reads like investigations built toward conviction. It reads like a publicity, intimidation, and fishing operation that will hold Trump’s attention for a while, and then peter out.
I’m reminded of something M. Gessen told me in 2013, when Vladimir Putin had arrested 30 of my Greenpeace colleagues and held them on “piracy” charges . Gessen said something along the lines of, your best hope is that eventually Putin will get bored, and the whole thing will seem annoying to him, and he’ll just shrug it off and let them go.
Which is basically what happened, though in the meantime, 30 innocent people were held in a Russian jail for two months under threat of a ten-year prison sentence, and countless hours and resources went to trying to free them.
Similarly here, Trump’s attacks don’t have to be sophisticated or even based in reality to do real damage.
It’s already working, in a way, for him. The ongoing Southern Poverty Law Center case shows the Vanguard Task Force rushing a sloppy indictment, then rewriting it just to keep the case open for maximum attention, with no apparent urgency about ever taking it to trial. The New York Post headlines are the point.
As we noted in May covering a similar attack on CAIR, the goal isn’t necessarily conviction. It’s intimidation, disruption, and right wing attention. These are feelings-based legal maneuvers with fact-based consequences for the target. They produce reputational damage, financial scrutiny, and operational chaos, whether or not the underlying legal theory survives.
The DOJ’s work in Minnesota is the same thing . Of 36 similar federal cases against Operation Metro Surge protesters, half have already collapsed — 18 dropped outright, three with prejudice, and 11 more abandoned through non-prosecution agreements.
Cop City makes the fishing-expedition structure even more explicit. The charges reach back to a 2022 protest, revived only after Attorney General Pam Bondi's December memo ordered federal agencies to "scour their files" for anything Antifa-related and hand it to investigators.
Cast a net wide enough to catch everything — in public, on camera — and sort it out later.
Sorta like a splashy MOU that doesn’t actually do anything? Sorta? Finding facts to fit a feeling, anyway.
Now What?
Last month, the "Now What" risk that felt most abstract was "protest and event exposure." The idea that anyone whose org had ever shown up near a demonstration the administration didn't like could get swept into a membership-mapping exercise built on old files.
The underlying conduct is from 2022, and the de Janon line about FBI offices "revisiting old files" on "Antifa" is exactly the mechanism we flagged. Here it’s being put into practice, just in time to try to save some semblance of MAGA control of the government after the midterms.
NSPM-7 is about using the umbrella term of "organized political violence" to go after Trump’s enemies. The voter-roll dragnet is about “fraud,” not “antifa,” but the target list overlaps: nonprofits, advocacy groups, civic infrastructure, mostly on the left, mostly doing work that touches elections or protest or anything Trump deems against his interest. Recall one of the first people mentioned when Sebastian Gorka rolled out the strategy was Tucker Carlson. So it’s not just lefties.
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Back in 1990, Ford Fairlane flopped. And Orion Studios folded shortly thereafter. We’ll see how “Bustin’” does with the general public, but the early test audience results aren’t promising. For Trump, anyway.
*NB: All typos are because Jack and Jill went up a hill
