Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday convened leaders from more than 60 countries as part of the Trump administration's effort to address what it calls "left wing" political terrorism.
This focus comes even as studies cited at the meeting show very few reported left-wing incidents in the U.S., especially compared with historically higher levels of far-right violence.
A report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing terrorism attacks as of July 4, 2025, had surpassed those from the far right for the first time in more than 30 years, while noting the uptick reflected a very low starting level and a concurrent drop on the far right.
"So many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression, so long as they served a left-wing cause," Rubio said. "A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was 'a nefarious and murderous act of evil.' It is, but a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary; well, that's just merely a tragic excess of idealism."
The report's authors warned that right-wing terrorism could easily return to elevated levels and said it is important to fight terrorism on both sides of the political spectrum.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that the Democratic Party's ascendant left are communists who want to "completely destroy the traditional American way of life" and even engage in assassinations, Vice President JD Vance has called communism "something we haven't seen in the U.S.," and House Speaker Mike Johnson has decried "radical candidates" who are "self-described, self-identifying Marxists."
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who arrived in Miami in May 1956, said his family's history shaped his worldview and blamed the Cuban government, saying that its intelligence and ideological network "helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere," the former Florida senator said Thursday.
Stephen Miller followed Rubio's remarks and said, "If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives."
The administration's rhetoric has at times conflated democratic socialism, which often centers on universal healthcare and higher taxes on the wealthy, with communism, under which private ownership is largely eliminated, a trend that the article said intensified after the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor and several of his proteges winning recent New York City congressional primaries.
Officials described policy responses taken so far: in November the State Department designated four antifa or anti-fascist groups in Europe as foreign terrorist organizations, Rubio announced a new policy to give the department wide latitude to restrict visas for members who supported or incited acts of terrorism, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, "We have spent decades developing the world's most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities, and now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home."