Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann
So, now Trump says we’re communists, you and me, after having earlier called us “potential domestic terrorists.”
“The Dumocrats, they are horrible. They want to resume the transgender mutilation of our children. They want to restart the war on Christians and churches. And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently — they’re communists, they’re not social Democrats — they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life. …
“You’ll live in squalor. There will be no food; there will be no housing; there will be no military; there will be no law and order; there will be no nothing. There will be no nothing. You’ll be a third world inhabitant in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. You’ll suffer or die, that’s what happens, for thousands of years because it’s been happening by different names. …
“The problem is, a couple of years go by, the whole place collapses, always does, always has. But I’m sorry to say, but assassinations of those who oppose them is a very important element of their ideology. Assassination is a big deal for them. They’re animals, they’re animals. … They hate our country, they hate our people…”
He’s getting desperate, trying in an almost cartoonish fashion to revisit the “Red Scare” era of his first mentor, Roy Cohn (as I describe in detail in The Last American President), and Cohn’s boss Joe McCarthy. It’s also a variation on the strategy of his second mentor, Vladimir Putin.
Ironically, the main tenant of communism is that the government owns the businesses; Trump is the first American president outside of temporary wartime nationalization efforts who’s actually having the federal government take large stock positions in American companies.
So far, Trump has had the feds buy major ownership positions in Intel, USA Rare Earths, Vulcan Elements, MP Materials, Korea Zinc, Lithium Americas, xLight, ReElement Tech, Trilogy Metals, Westinghouse, Nvadia, AMD, and US Steel. And now he’s talking about our government taking parts of OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI companies.
This is a far cry from Barack Obama lending Elon Musk’s Tesla $465 million to keep him out of bankruptcy; having the government actually and permanently own meaningful parts of companies is about the closest you can get to the kind of communism we saw in the old USSR, China, and Cuba.
But the most astonishing part of the whole thing is how our mainstream media is treating Trump’s new red-baiting, taking on the role of stenographers rather than reporters. By and large, they’re letting this absurd charge stand as if it were actually credible, as Dan Froomkin has documented in detail in his excellent Substack Press Watch.
In reality, American communists are, frankly, a joke. I remember a few decades ago, the last time Republicans were calling Democrats communists, having the president of the US Communist Party on my radio show. I asked him how things were going and what his membership was, and he said, as I recall, words to the effect of:
“Things are going great. We’re up to almost 3000 members!”
The real threat to America today, Trump’s hysteria notwithstanding, isn’t communism: it’s the new American form of fascism that’s centered in the Trump regime, the Republicans on the Supreme Court, ICE, and is pushed heavily across the rightwing media empires that neofascist billionaires have set up over the past 40 years.
But he and the GOP consultants and the extremists who write his speeches seem to think they can make “communism” stick as the new label to apply to Democrats. And no doubt there are enough low-information voters out there that some will believe him when he spouts bullshit like Froomkin documents he did at the Faith and Freedom Christian nationalist conference:
“These are not social Democrats. These are hardcore, godless communists. They’re godless communists. All communists are godless. They don’t believe in God. This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion, 250 years ago. This is a major threat to our country.”
Apparently, the growing popularity of social democracy or democratic socialism—what in earlier versions FDR called the New Deal and LBJ labeled the Great Society—has the GOP and the oligarchs who own the party freaked out.
After all, these “left-wing” Democrats are pushing things that a solid majority of Americans have been telling pollsters they want ever since the days of Eisenhower: a national healthcare system, free college, quality public schools and local hospitals, unions and a livable minimum wage, and affordable housing, transportation, electricity, and groceries.
And those things would require demanding that the morbidly rich suddenly—after 45 years of the Reaganomics scam—start paying their damn taxes.
And the “democratic socialist” idea of taxing the rich to pay for the “General Welfare”—an obligation of our government specified in both the preamble and Article I of the Constitution—isn’t anything new or radical.
Long before anyone used the phrase, our nation’s Founders built the bones of what we’d today call democratic socialism.
In 1798 John Adams signed the Marine Hospital Act, which took 20 cents a month out of every sailor’s pay and was our country’s first federal payroll tax, and used it to build and run a network of government owned-and-run hospitals.
That wasn’t charity or a one-time bailout; it was a permanent, mandatory, federally operated healthcare system, the direct ancestor of today’s Public Health Service, and Thomas Jefferson was presiding over the Senate when this socialist program passed.
The next year Congress extended it to the Navy and added half-pay disability pensions for men hurt in the line of duty. That same founding generation federalized lighthouses and navigation aids in 1789, paid invalid pensions to Revolutionary War veterans, appropriated relief for refugees fleeing the Haitian revolution in 1794, and under James Madison set up a federal agency to get smallpox vaccine to ordinary people in 1813.
The men who wrote the Constitution didn’t treat the general welfare clause as a throwaway phrase; they taxed wealthy people, required participation, and spent public money to keep working Americans healthy, safe, and solvent, which is exactly the instinct today’s right sneers at as “socialism” and Trump is now calling “communism.”
But because Republicans have opposed anything that might help average people (and have to be paid for by the rich) since the days of Warren Harding, their tightfisted penury (except to subsidize the fossil fuel industry and the Epstein-billionaire class) isn’t generally popular when you ask people about specific policies.
So, instead, they have to invent a new hysteria every election cycle.
From Willie Horton to “Swift Boats,” from “death panels” to “death taxes,” from the War on Christmas to migrant caravans, Critical Race Theory, “groomers,” and transgender athletes, Republicans have spent the past four decades rolling out a succession of emotionally charged wedge issues and moral panics to shift public attention away from debates over healthcare, wages, taxes, labor rights, and other core policy issues.
So, Trump, Mike Johnson, and the whole bunch are now calling us communists, thinking they’ve finally hit on the strategy for 2026.
Oddly, about half of Americans literally aren’t old enough to remember the horrors of Stalin and Mao, and today’s Chinese communism seems to be working startling well (largely because it’s reinvented itself as state-managed capitalism). But since Reagan took a meataxe to our public education system, odds are most people under 50 haven’t even studied the actual difference between democratic socialism, state-run communism, and regulated capitalism.
So, will calling Democrats communists work for them this time the way smearing Democrats with race or gender has in the past?
Will the mainstream media ever get around to calling out this new McCarthyism for what it is?
Will Americans figure out it’s just another GOP diversion from their decades-long campaign to rob working people to the benefit of the morbidly rich?
I’m skeptical it’ll work, but the rightwing billionaire money doesn’t start pouring into this year’s election for another month or so: stay tuned…
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.
