Once again a Trump administration is debating whether or not to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The last time around, during Trump’s first term, the effort petered out amidst disagreements among Trump’s then principals. This time around, the stars may be better aligned. However, the inevitable controversy surrounding such a move must still be managed. Islamist groups in the United States and beyond are expected to fight the measure through legal, media, and other means.
The key for the Trump administration is to approach the problem with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Certain Muslim Brotherhood branches meet clear criteria for a terror designation. Others are less cut and dry. Distinguishing between the two could be the difference between a successful initiative and one the sputters like the last time around.
Background on the Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by a charismatic school teacher, Hasan al-Banna, as a response to the British colonial presence in Egypt and the spread of Western culture more generally. It has inspired many anti-Western terrorist movements for nearly a century. An Egyptian journalist and Brotherhood member, Sayid Qutb, further articulated Islamist views that contributed in the 1950s to the movement’s expansion. Over the decades, this network grew rapidly outside of Egypt. Today, it’s a global phenomenon, with chapters that operate both openly and underground, in the West and in the Muslim world.
While the hate-filled ideology of this movement is consistent, the outward expression of its worldview is not always violent. Some offshoots of the movement simply provide a safe space for Islamist hatred of the West. Nevertheless, the movement must be seen as a stepping-stone toward violent jihadism. In perhaps the most notorious historical anecdote, Osama bin Laden’s partner in the creation of al-Qa’ida was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the late leader of the Islamic State, was also believed to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth. Many other terrorist leaders in the Middle East began with Muslim Brotherhood indoctrination.
The Muslim Brotherhood became careful over the years, as its leadership came under varying degrees of pressure from Middle East governments. Some (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain) have declared the Brotherhood an illegal terrorist organization. As a result, individual chapters have had little choice but to curb their ideological fervor, and to restrain their members from engaging in violent acts. Morocco’s Muslim Brotherhood chapter, for example, has positioned itself as a loyal opposition to the King. The Brotherhood in Jordan did the same for decades, until authorities broke up a plot to attack the Kingdom in April 2025.
At the height of the war on terrorism, as the United States government sought to shape hearts and minds in the Middle East, the George W. Bush administration attempted to assess whether or not a terror designation against the Brotherhood was feasible. The varying levels of extremism exhibited by the disparate chapters of this network made the bureaucracy skittish. Momentum stalled and the issue dropped further and further down the list of national security priorities.
The Obama administration simply had no appetite to pursue the Muslim Brotherhood. During the Arab Spring protests, amidst a surge of Brotherhood activity from Libya and Egypt to Yemen and Syria, the administration tried to co-opt the movement to steer the chaos toward stability. Obama sought out Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a global patron and enabler of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a partner in this endeavor. Obama ultimately soured on Erdoğan after his brutal crackdown on the peaceful Gezi Park protests in Istanbul of 2013. But this did not change Obama’s overall tolerance for the Islamist movement, even as it continued to destabilize Middle East states.
When the Trump administration ascended in 2017, there was a clear desire to tackle the issue. Congress held hearings; discussions were convened at senior levels of the administration. But the strategy for a terrorist designation was never formed. Internal debates mired the issue in bureaucratic process, then the pandemic of 2020 ensured that the issue remained low on the list of priorities through the end of Trump’s first term.
The Options Today
While the Biden administration shrugged off the matter for four years, the question of designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization is now back up for debate.
The Trump administration appears to have at least three viable options on the table. The easiest approach, and the bluntest, would be to issue an executive order. The order could make the entire Muslim Brotherhood, the sum of all its disparate parts, an outlawed group. Such a move would spark an outcry among those who would correctly argue that not all chapters of the group are violent and therefore do not meet the criteria for designating a terrorist organization. The order would still likely hold until the election of an administration that would repeal it. But, in the interim, the global Muslim Brotherhood would take a beating.
Another approach would be to issue a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation through the State Department, adding the Brotherhood to the US list of FTOs. Under the leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, this may be a viable strategy. But slapping an FTO designation on the Muslim Brotherhood will not be simple. The process requires evidentiary documents cleared by multiple layers of lawyers. But if such a designation were to meet the criteria of the State Department lawyers, its international legitimacy would be enhanced.
A third approach would be to work through the Treasury Department to issue Specially Designation Global Terrorist (SDGT) targeted sanctions on individual Muslim Brotherhood branches as evidence is accumulated against them. The Brotherhood in Yemen (the Islah Party, which partners with the Houthis) and Jordan (where a violent Brotherhood plot was recently broken up by the government) are very likely to meet such criteria. From there, the Treasury could begin to expand the network to other affiliates that meet criteria.
The Treasury Department’s process offers the opportunity, over time, to designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood. When evidence points to certain branches or individuals from the Brotherhood’s disparate branches providing financial, technical or material support to groups already under sanctions, they themselves become targets for designation. Such an endeavor is by its nature iterative. It would be based on a process that was first introduced with the introduction of Executive Order 13224 in late 2001, as the US government began to issue sanctions against a wide range of terrorist groups.
What to do about Brotherhood branches in the United States and in Western allies that meet the criteria for designation? The United States no longer imposes sanctions on domestic entities. The process of blocking the assets of those still living and working in America proved far too cumbersome. So, these matters become the jurisdiction of federal law enforcement. The FBI would need to get busy. Fortunately, Task Force 10/7, which was stood up in early 2025 to fight antisemitism in the United States, may already have a few good leads on this front.
In Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood is also a major concern. A new French report suggests that a crisis may be brewing. The combined intelligence of Europe and the United States, coupled with input from Israel and perhaps some other Middle Eastern countries, could prove useful. In some cases, foreign governments may choose to join the United States in a bilateral designation, with concurrent law enforcement action, based upon evidence provided by the United States government.
The debate over a Muslim Brotherhood designation is beginning to gain steam. As some of Trump’s other policies generate controversy, this one may seem less so today. In light of Brotherhood-led violence in several countries in recent years, many believe US policy measures against the organization are long overdue. The ball is in Trump’s court.
