President Donald Trump reportedly confirmed Sunday that his administration is preparing to officially classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a move conservatives have long pushed for but previous administrations refused to take.
“It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms,” Trump told Just The News. “Final documents are being drawn.”
The announcement comes just days after Texas Governor Greg Abbott took similar action at the state level, designating both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as “foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations.”
Abbott did not mince words.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” he said. “Their actions supporting terrorism across the globe and subverting our laws through violence, intimidation, and harassment are unacceptable.”
CAIR has already filed suit against Texas over the designation.
The Muslim Brotherhood has a long and well-documented history tied to extremist networks. Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the group is the ideological forefather of numerous radical Islamic movements. Hamas — designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization — identifies itself in its 1988 charter as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.”
Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated groups operating in Western countries often strike a moderate tone publicly, but experts caution that this is typically a strategic posture rather than a rejection of their core ambitions. According to an analysis from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Brotherhood’s disavowal of violence in the West is “almost always born of prudence, not principle.”
FDD notes that while the group may be more cautious than ISIS or al-Qaeda, it still “places a premium on remaining able to gradually promote its brand of Islam,” avoiding direct confrontation with governments only when it risks jeopardizing the movement’s long-term goals.
Those long-term goals were put under a microscope last week when the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy released a sweeping 265-page report mapping the Muslim Brotherhood’s “ideological, institutional, and financial penetration into North America.”
The report details what it describes as the Brotherhood’s century-long plan to infiltrate Western institutions and erode democratic systems from within. Dr. Charles Asher Small, founding director of the institute, issued a stark warning:
“This is not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project that adapts itself to Western systems while working to undermine them. The Brotherhood uses the very freedoms of democracy as tools to erode it from within, exploiting the tolerance and openness of liberal societies as strategic vulnerabilities.”
Trump’s decision signals a dramatic shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy — one that acknowledges the ideological threat posed not just by overt jihadist groups, but by organizations that present themselves as political or social movements while pursuing deeply anti-Western goals.
With Texas already taking action and the federal government preparing to follow, the Muslim Brotherhood’s status in America is on the verge of a major reckoning.
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