A specter is haunting America—the specter of communism. Or so President Donald Trump and his allies would have you believe. |
According to a Reuters tally, Trump invoked the c-word 81 times over a two-week stretch in late June and early July. The president’s accusations of communism picked up after the June 23 Democratic Party primaries in New York, where a handful of leftist candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won contested elections. DSA-backed congressional candidates have also emerged victorious in states like Pennsylvania and Colorado. |
In response, Trump has ripped a page straight from the Cold War playbook of the 1960s, sowing unfounded fears among Republican voters about “hardcore, godless communists” who are “totally opposed to our way of life.” The president’s aides reportedly view this as an effective way to galvanize the MAGA base heading into midterm elections in the fall. |
Even setting aside the willful conflation of communism and socialism, there are several problems with this strategy. For starters, it ignores the fact that, 18 months into Trump’s second term, the U.S. economy has stalled: Wage and employment growth have leveled off and inflation expectations remain elevated. A recent CNBC poll found that 61 percent of the U.S. public is pessimistic about the economy, and 60 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. With so many voters concerned about bread-and-butter issues, Trump’s red-baiting rhetoric risks coming off as tone-deaf. |
Yet there is also an important historical lineage behind the president’s obsession with communism. During his rise to prominence in the New York real estate industry, he was mentored by Roy Cohn, who prosecuted the convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn later went on to serve as chief legal counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose infamous anti-communist investigations during the 1950s triggered a wave of political repression that ruined thousands of lives. |
It is doubtful that the same tactics McCarthy once employed—and which led to his downfall and censure by Congress—will resonate today. The median voter is 52 years old, meaning they weren’t yet old enough to vote when the Berlin Wall fell or when the Soviet Union collapsed. And while Americans continue to hold more favorable views of capitalism than socialism, the gap is getting smaller. |
But Trump’s anachronistic warnings of a “communist menace” don’t represent just his own personal views: This Cold War-era mindset pervades his administration and the broader Republican Party. Consider a recent report from the State Department titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism.” |
“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” the report warns in its opening paragraph. It goes on to claim that “Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history—from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses—can be linked, in some way, shape, or form to Cuban influence.” |
As historian Michael Bustamante pointed out in a thread on X, the pages that follow are filled with selective history, exaggerating the threat that Cuba poses to America while omitting the genuine grievances that have fueled contemporary and historical activism in the United States. For example, “Much of the report’s review of Cuba’s support for Black movements historically reads as if there were no reason—in the 60s or the present—for African-Americans to have criticisms of life in [the] United States at all,” Bustamante wrote. |
Instead, the report would have its readers believe that virtually all domestic discontent in America over the past six decades has been manufactured by a sinister foreign government. The same government that is, according to Trump, teetering on the verge of collapse due to his administration’s own fuel blockade. |
Like Trump’s bombastic claims of modern-day communist subterfuge and terror plots, the claims in the report don’t stand up to even the mildest scrutiny. That doesn’t mean they can’t do real damage, particularly if the claims in the report are used to justify military action against Cuba in some form. But as a political tactic to win votes in the upcoming midterms, they are unlikely to be effective. |