For years, US President Donald Trump blamed the “communists” of his legal and political problems. Now, Trump’s second government is using that same label, of strong historical burden, to portray his adversaries – from judges to educators – as threats to the identity, culture and values of the United States.
Because? Trump himself explained the strategy last year when he described how he planned to defeat his Democratic opponent, then Vice President Kamala Harris, in the presidential election.
“All we have to do is define our opponent as a communist or a socialist or someone who will destroy our country,” he told reporters in his golf club in New Jersey in August.
Trump did precisely that, calling Harris “Comrade Kamala”, and won in November. With the consent of more than 77 million Americans who cast their votes – 49.9% of the total – Trump is taking that strategy to his second term.
What he’s talking about is not “communism”
In 2025, communism exerts great influence in countries such as China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. But not in the United States.
“The core of communism is the belief that governments can do better than markets in the provision of goods and services. There are very, very few people in the West who really create that,” Raymond Robertson said of the Faculty of Government and Public Service Bush of the Texas A&M University. “Unless they are arguing that the government should direct Us Steel and Tesla, they are simply not communists.”
The word “communist”, on the other hand, can have enormous emotional power as a rhetorical tool, even now. It is even more powerful as a pejorative term – although frequently inaccurate, even dangerous – amid the contemporary flash of social networks and misinformation. After all, the fear and paranoia of the Russian revolution, the “red fear”, World war II, Macartism and the Cold War are fading in the past of the twentieth century.
But Trump, 78 and famous for labeling people who consider obstacles, remembers it.
“We cannot allow a handful of radical judges of the communist left to obstruct the application of our laws,” said the president on Tuesday in Michigan when he celebrated his first 100 days in office. The White House did not respond to a request for clarification on what Trump means when he calls someone “communist.”
It is worth attending to the moment he uses “communist.”
Trump’s speech in Michigan occurred during a week of complicated economic news and political. Days before, a survey by The Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs revealed that more Americans disagree with Trump’s priorities so far that according to them, and that many Republicans are ambivalent about their focus elections. After the speech, the government reported that the economy contracted during the first quarter of 2025 because Trump’s tariffs interrupted businesses.
On Thursday, the main presidential advisor Stephen Miller went up to the White House podium and delivered the same word “communism” four times in about 35 minutes during a complaint of past policies about issues of transgender people, diversity and immigration.
“These are some of the areas in which President Trump has fought against the Cancer communist Woke culture that was destroying this country,” Miller told reporters.
His words collection offered a selection of attractive content for social media users, as well as terms that could capture the attention of older Americans. Voters over 45 voted for little margin in favor of Trump about their Democratic rivals in 2020 and 2024.
In the center of Miller’s phrase: “communist.”
“It tends to be a term loaded with negative affection, particularly for major Americans who grew during the Cold War,” said Jacob Neiheisel, an expert in political communications at the University of Buffalo. “Attaching terms emotionally charged to political adversaries is a way of minimizing their legitimacy in the eyes of the public and painting them negatively.”
Figure of the era of “red fear” influenced a young Trump
The threat that communists could influence or even destroy the United States on the country for decades and led some of the most unpleasant chapters in the country’s history.
The years after World War I and the Russian Revolution in 1917, together with a wave of immigrants, led to what is known as the “Red Fear” of 1920, a period of intense paranoia about the possibility of a revolution led by communists in the United States.
The “macartism” after World War II meant the hunt for communist assumptions. He is named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin’s Republican who carried out televised audiences at the beginning of the cold war that the anti -communist fears carried out at new heights with a series of threats, insinuations and falsehoods.
Culturally, the mere suggestion that someone was “soft” with communism could end careers and ruin lives. The “black lists” of communist assumptions proliferated in Hollywood and beyond. McCarthy fell out of favor and died in 1957.
The main advisor of the Senator during the audiences, Roy Cohn, became Trump’s mentor and problem solving when he was ascending real estate in New York. The cold war had more than three decades of antiquity. The threat of nuclear war was omnipresent.
Communism began to collapse in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved two years later. It is now Russia, governed by President Vladimir Putin.
But communism – at least in one way – is still alive in China, a country with which Trump libra a commercial war that could result in less numerous and more expensive products in the United States. At the end of the week, Trump was recognizing the possible consequences of his government’s intervention: Americans could soon not be able to buy what they want, or they could be forced to pay more. He insisted that China will be more harmed by tariffs.
The true modern debate, says Robertson, is not between capitalism and communism, but how much the government needs to intervene and when. He suggests that Trump is not really debating communism vs. capitalism anyway.
“Calling ‘communists’ who advocate slightly greater government participation is a typical misleading political rhetoric that, unfortunately, works very well with voters who do not have much time to think about technical definitions and economic paradigms,” he said in an email. “It is also very useful (for Trump) because it is inflammatory, making people get angry, which can be addictive.”
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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
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