Opinion | Why Donald Trump Says His Enemies Are Communists

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Trump continued his red baiting throughout his term in the White House. In September 2019, he used an address to the United Nations General Assembly to further his anti-communist crusade. Socialism and communism, Trump said, are not about justice. They are not about equality. They are not about uplifting the poor. They are certainly not about the good of the country. Socialism and communism are all about power for the ruling class.

America, Trump promised, would never be a socialist country.

At a September 2020 White House event honoring Cuban-American veterans of the accidental, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Trump repeated that promise and labeled his political opponents radical Marxist.

If you look at the kind of ideology we are also facing … Trump told the appreciative audience, we did not fight tyranny abroad only to let Marxists destroy our beloved country.

In his 2020 re-election campaign, he told a rally of supporters in Vandalia, Ohio, The choice in November will be very simple. Never before has there been such a difference. One is probably communism. I do not know. They keep saying socialism. I think they got past that one. Those have passed.

Three years later, reviving the Red Scare is also part of Trumps 2024 electoral strategy. This works for at least three reasons.

First, it was designed to appeal to older voters who remembered the days when the phrase Better Dead Than Red signaled the unity of white people in this country against a common enemy. Polls show that only 3 percent of people age 70 and older have a favorable view of communism compared to 28 percent of Gen Z.

Second, it arouses fear in China, the most prominent and powerful communist country today.

Finally, this language has special meaning in South Florida, where the former president is under federal indictment. It is no accident that Trump reacted to his arraignment in the classified documents case on June 13 by waving the bloody flag of communism and describing the threat it supposedly poses.

If the communists can get away with it, he said in a speech later that day, it won’t stop me. They will not hesitate to step up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates.

Notably, in his post-indictment speech he linked what was happening to him to a litany of familiar, polarizing, conservative culture war issues. If they get me, he suggested to supporters, they’ll be after you soon. And that message seems to have worked, with some of his MAGA allies quick to join Trump in blaming communists for his legal woes. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, said the indictment was a product of the CORRUPT AND WEAPONIZED COMMUNISTS DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED DOJ.

The former president is hitting the Red Scare hard today in hopes of influencing his upcoming trial. Because the jury in the classified documents case will come from Miami, a haven for Cuban-Americans and immigrants from socialist-ruled Venezuela, he hopes to appeal to potential jurors who could block a conviction. What better way to gain their sympathy than to suggest that his persecution was part of a communist conspiracy?

As Harvard professor Steven Levitsky argues, for many Americans, Trumps anti-communist rhetoric sounds like nonsense. But (for) people who are either descendants of Cuban exiles or actual Venezuelans exile who is really fascinated by some chords.

And news reports suggest that Trump is indeed appealing to a receptive audience. An Associated Press story last week said that for some Hispanic Trump supporters who gathered outside the federal courthouse in Miami where the former president was arraigned, the charges brought back memories of political persecution that their family members once escaped.

The AP quoted one protester, Madelin Munilla, as saying she came to Miami as a child when her parents fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba and carried a poster with a photo of Biden with Castro, and leftist leaders from Venezuela and Nicaragua. Munilla said about the Trump indictment, This is what they are doing in Latin America.

Regardless of his motivations, Trump’s kind of red baiting has long lines. This is right out of the playbook of authoritarians and tyrants from the early 20th century. This helped the rise of fascist leaders in mid-century Germany and Italy.

Like them, today’s powerful and would-be powerful people like the former president need powerful narratives against them, and communism is a tried and true boogeyman. It works, as columnist John P. Baird says, to narrow the spectrum of what is possible to achieve in politics. It has been used historically against all kinds of change agents.

Trumps revival of the Red Scare also draws on an American tradition that fueled the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, when the Justice Department arrested and deported anarchists, communists, and radical leftists. The raids, sparked by social unrest after World War I, were the culmination of that era’s own Red Scare.

Trump is definitely channeling his mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn served as a prosecutor in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage, and was chief counsel to Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950 hearings that many communists and Soviet spies had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities and the film industry.

Seven decades after Cohn and McCarthy, the former president continues to try to bring back the Red Scare even though, as journalist Ed Kilgore notes, There is not a single Democratic political figure in the United States who conforms to anything resembling communism.

Trump is hallucinating a communist threat where there is none and promoting what The Guardian columnist Richard Seymour has labeled anti-communism without communism. Seymour is right when he suggests that for a would-be authoritarian like Trump, communism implies a single, treacherous, demonic enemy. Rather like a racial stereotype, Seymour writes, communism symbolically presents the systemic crisis as a diabolical plot. Those labeled communists are blamed not only for the reforms they demand, but for all crises. which calls for reform.

By invoking demonic forces, Trump is bolstering his anti-democratic claim that, as he put it in his post-indictment speech, only I can save this country.

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