The midterm elections loom with economic pain, foreign policy stumbles, and immigration chaos dogging the administration. Facing a political landscape littered with failed promises and unpopular decisions, Trump has pivoted to a decades-old playbook: accusing Democrats of communism.
The economy is not cooperating. Prices are climbing faster than wages, leaving most Americans poorer. Foreign policy offers no victories to tout. A military operation in Iran turned into a debacle. Tariffs have proven an utter failure. The war in Ukraine remains unsettled, despite earlier promises of swift resolution. Immigration raids and mass deportations have become deeply unpopular with voters.
With traditional campaign themes exhausted, Trump reached back to a rhetorical weapon that has mobilized the right for nearly a century. At Mount Rushmore during America's 250th anniversary celebration, he warned of a resurgence of the "communist menace" and labeled rising young Democratic politicians as radicals and extremists bent on un-American values.
For years, Trump has attempted to paint policies like Medicare for All, universal childcare, and free public higher education as communist schemes. The strategy has never gained traction because most Americans actually support these initiatives. Rebranding them as communist threats appears to be an act of desperation.
The tactic echoes a darker chapter in American history. After World War II, Republicans weaponized anticommunism to dismantle the New Deal. The 1946 midterm elections became framed as a "battle between Republicanism and communism." Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the campaign, with Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo calling multiracial labor unions' push for civil rights the work of "northern communists." Representative John Elliott Rankin, who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, branded labor's southern organizing drive a "communist plot," fearful it would expand voting rights for Black Americans.
The strategy worked. Democrats lost control of Congress in 1946. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California elected a young Republican lawyer named Richard Nixon, who had already grasped the power of red-baiting as a political weapon.
McCarthy's reign of accusation became legendary. During the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, he attacked a young attorney working for the opposing counsel, threatening to destroy the man's career with unsubstantiated charges of communist ties. When the army's counsel, Joseph Welch, finally confronted McCarthy directly, asking "Have you no sense of decency?", the senator's career imploded almost overnight. Welch had tapped into something deeper than fear. McCarthy was censured, ostracized, and eventually drank himself to death at 48.
One detail worth noting: McCarthy's chief counsel during those hearings was Roy Cohn, a former prosecutor who had pushed for the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. After McCarthy's downfall, Cohn became a New York power broker who would eventually serve as Trump's mentor.
The problem facing Trump now is that the young Democratic politicians he wants to villainize have little connection to actual communism or even socialism. They are popular precisely because they challenge corporate power, expose political corruption fueled by big money, and address the concrete problems ordinary Americans face daily. The labels feel increasingly hollow.
Polling suggests the Communist scare card may not work this time. A recent Axios-Generation Lab survey found 67 percent of young Americans hold positive or neutral views of socialism, compared with just 40 percent who feel the same about capitalism. A Cato Institute study shows Gen Z voters favor socialism 53 percent to 45 percent for capitalism. These generational shifts reflect real economic anxiety. Young people cannot afford homes, struggle with health insurance costs, face brutal job markets, and see family formation out of reach.
What may concern Americans more than phantom communist threats is the prospect of democratic erosion itself. The same Cato poll found 56 percent of Americans worried the country could cease being free within fifty years due to corruption and abuses of power at the highest government levels.
Trump has no genuine ideology to defend. He does not care about capitalism or fear socialism. His singular unwavering belief is in narcissism of the most malignant variety. When every legitimate argument for re-election has collapsed, reaching for the Communist menace is what remains.
Author James Rodriguez: "Recycling McCarthy-era hysteria when your actual record is in tatters is not strategy, it's panic dressed up as patriotism."
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