Critics hounded the Trump administration on Friday after the White House released its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy report earlier that morning, which onlookers immediately noticed was riddled with typos and grammatical errors.
“This entire document looks like something written by an intern,” wrote author and foreign policy analyst Kabir Taneja on Friday in a social media post on X.
The document, which includes a lengthy foreword written by President Donald Trump attacking the “weakness” of the Biden administration, includes countless typos: the word “capability” is misspelled as “capbility,” the word “specific” is misspelled as “specifc,” and “school board” is merged into a single word as “schoolboard.”
The document also contains sentences that appear to have words missing. One sentence reads "counterterrorism is a core part the national security mission,” which appears to be missing the word “of.”
“This was once a serious document written by serious people in both Dem and GOP Admins,” noted Juliette Kayyem, a senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and former government official. “Now it reads like a partisan screed, lacking data or analysis or discussion of capabilities or relative threats, filled with typos, and mocks the American public’s intelligence.”
Beyond the grammatical errors, critics also took note of what some characterized as the Trump administration’s partisan view of counterterrorism.
Perhaps most notably, the report names “violent left-wing extremists” as among the top three “major types of terror groups,” and omits right-wing extremists, despite right-wing extremists being responsible for “all extremist-related murders in 2024,” the third year in a row in which right-wing extremists had been “connected to all identified extremist-related killings,” per reporting from the Anti-Defamation League.
The document also lists “radically pro-transgender” groups as among the Trump administration’s key targets in its 2026 counterterrorism strategy.
“Hard to put into words how garbage this ‘strategy’ truly is,” wrote journalist and cybersecurity analyst Jackie Singh in a social media post on X.
This was once a serious document written by serious people in both Dem and GOP Admins. Now it reads like a partisan screed, lacking data or analysis or discussion of capabilities or relative threats, filled with typos, and mocks the American public’s intelligence. https://t.co/TcJymC8Oyl
— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) May 8, 2026