Trump targets the Muslim Brotherhood wisely — taking down its terror arms piece by piece

President Donald Trump is not known for restraint, but with the executive order he issued Monday his administration is taking a measured approach in its offensive against the Muslim Brotherhood — and that’s surely the wisest course.

The Brotherhood, now a global movement, embraces three core principles that include: “The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our path. Martyrdom is our aspiration.”

Its branches include Hamas, and its most prominent alumni include the late al Qaeda chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

For over a decade, Republicans on Capitol Hill have pushed to officially designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, putting it in the crosshairs of law enforcement — or even setting the stage for military action.

These advocates have mainly favored a single pronouncement that would treat every arm of the movement, on every continent, as part of one unified organization — as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently did in his state.

Trump has firmly rejected that approach.

Instead, his new executive order tasks the State and Treasury departments with evaluating the Brotherhood chapter by chapter and determining which components deserve the terrorist label.

This approach is likely to have a far greater and more lasting impact — because it matches the decentralized, even haphazard, organization of the Brotherhood itself.

The Brotherhood has no paramount leader and no central council or governing body.

As the founding branch, the Egyptian Brotherhood enjoys a special prestige, and its leader carries the title of Supreme Guide — but has no means of exerting control.

National branches go their own way, adapting to local conditions to maximize their growth and influence.

These facts matter because a terror designation can be challenged in court.

It’s rare, because the departments of State and Treasury traditionally build their cases cautiously and comprehensively.

But if the White House insisted on designating a group with no leader, no headquarters and no clear control over its constituent parts, the result would be a legal debacle.

To avoid that, the president  has instructed the secretaries of State and Treasury to deliver a report within 30 days addressing whether any “Muslim Brotherhood chapters or subdivisions” meet the legal criteria for designation as terrorist groups, with a final decision to follow within 45 days.

The order specifically requires evaluation of the movement’s branches in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.

Last month, in a report assessing the merits of designating various Brotherhood branches, my colleagues and I found that action is more than warranted on the Lebanese and Jordanian fronts.

In Lebanon, the Brotherhood operates as the Islamic Group, which lavished praise on Hamas for the atrocities of Oct. 7 — then directed its militia to join Hezbollah in rocket attacks on northern Israel, relieving some of the pressure on Hamas in Gaza.

In Jordan, where the Brotherhood spent decades reassuring authorities that it rejected violence, the state intelligence service this year found that the group’s members were manufacturing rockets and drones for a planned attack on “sensitive sites” in the kingdom.

The Brotherhood insisted that those arrested were acting independently, but Amman rejected that rationale and launched a crackdown.

It’s a different situation in Egypt, where the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has spent a decade crushing the Brotherhood, jailing its leaders and dismantling its political arm.

Still, the Egyptian Brotherhood has generated a pair of violent splinter groups that the first Trump administration designated as terrorist organizations.

What’s clear is that the Egyptian Brotherhood has not changed its ideological orientation.

On Oct. 7 this year, its leader celebrated  Hamas for how it had “awakened the cinder of jihad” in 2023, and called for those outside Gaza to provide the enclave with “military support.” 

One critical question left open by Trump’s executive order is how to stop foreign governments, like those of Qatar and Turkey, from supporting Brotherhood chapters that cross the line into terrorism.

Both Ankara and Doha have remained firm supporters of Hamas even after Oct. 7, and their broadcasting arms, especially Qatar’s Al Jazeera, promote pro-Hamas and pro-Brotherhood narratives.

In theory, Washington could designate either Turkey or Qatar as a state sponsor of terrorism for this boosting — yet that label is reserved historically for the worst of the worst, and the two nations are, technically at least, US allies.

The first step may simply be for Trump to put an end to public praise for Ankara and Doha, while turning up the heat in private.

If that isn’t enough, the Treasury Department can hit individual officials with sanctions.

They are likely to need a wake-up call — much like the one the White House just directed at the Muslim Brotherhood.

David Adesnik is the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.