Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace”.
He can’t talk about the economy because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “day one”. He can’t talk about immigration because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.
So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?
He’s resorting to the oldest of rightwing tropes – accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being communists.
He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace”. With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists”.
“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
Oh, please.
For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about Democrats who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).
But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.
So now he’s throwing scary labels at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Communism was the scare word used after the first and second world wars to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch-hunts and ruined careers.
It made the former Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he forced American citizens to “name names” and ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those communists and queers”.
McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The party had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism”, and the Republican National Committee chairperson claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets”.
Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. The Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who had filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists”. Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ southern organizing campaign “a communist plot”, fearing it would give more voting rights to Black people. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”
The communist scare tactics were temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool, Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent him to the Senate, too.
It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.
On 9 June 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the US army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.
As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”
I was only eight years old, but I was spellbound.
McCarthy didn’t stop.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted, even more loudly.
At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.
During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.
After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery and theft – eventually to become Trump’s mentor.
So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has almost no other cards left to play.
The problem for Trump is that the stars of the Democratic party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism. Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.
Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67% say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40% who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism”. A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53%) than capitalism (45%).
I can understand gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism – or whatever you want to call our current system – has failed them. And they’re the future of America.
So I doubt Trump’s new red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.
To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s neofascism than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56% of Americans worried that the US could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.
Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. His only firm belief is in the ancient ideology called narcissism, of the especially malignant sort.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK