President Trump has issued an executive order directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization. There is no indication as of this writing as to when this might occur or what form the designation will finally take. But it is highly likely that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s recent designation of the Muslim Brotherhood and its US ally, the Council on American Islamic Relations, as terrorist organizations, served to prompt President Trump to act.

There should be no controversy over the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood is best described as the forefather of all modern Jihadist terrorist groups.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been directly involved in Jihadist terrorism. It was the Muslim Brotherhood that formed HAMAS (an acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement”), the genocidal Jihadist terrorist organization which massacred 1,000 Israelis on October 7, 2023  (many of them women and children) and that seeks to replace Israel with an Islamic state ruled by sharia.

Here are some key passages from the Hamas charter:

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

The Hamas charter also directly ties Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood:

“The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times. It is characterised by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and judgement, the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult and conversion to Islam.”

Hamas itself is in fact designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department and has been since 1997.

Make no mistake, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have a large presence inside the USA. That was brought home vividly when tens of thousands of pro-Hamas demonstrators and rioters took to the streets of our cities and college campuses in the wake of the genocidal October 7 attack.

There is no justification for not designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Even some of America’s closest Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have all designated the Muslim Brotherhood. Under the first Trump Administration, the US designated two known Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood terrorist wings, HASM and Liwa al-Thawra, but did not achieve a designation of the entire international organization.

All of this has been known in US political circles for years, but it took bold action on the state level to finally get progress on the federal level. That state level action took the form of Governor Abbott’s Executive Order in Texas, which designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Transnational Criminal Organization. Importantly, the Texas order also extended these designations to CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations.

CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism financing conviction in US history. In that trial, in documented evidence that was stipulated to by the defense, CAIR was identified as a Muslim Brotherhood organization.

The supporting documentation for Governor Abbott’s designation of CAIR mirrored almost identically Center for Security Policy-originated resolutions condemning CAIR passed by the legislatures of Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida. The same language was introduced in Texas in its most recent legislative session as well.

The 2026 State Legislative sessions are fast approaching. The other states should act to pass measures similar to Texas to enact a “belt and suspenders” approach to defending America against Jihad in its violent and non-violent forms. That will motivate the slow-moving federal level to act and provide a legal bulwark against Islamic subversion and insurrection.