{"id":220109,"date":"2026-08-10T15:22:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T15:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-revives-old-tropes-as-he-pushes-warnings-of-communist-menace-donald-trump-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T15:22:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T15:22:25","slug":"trump-revives-old-tropes-as-he-pushes-warnings-of-communist-menace-donald-trump-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-revives-old-tropes-as-he-pushes-warnings-of-communist-menace-donald-trump-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of \u2018communist menace\u2019 | Donald Trump – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

President harks back to red scare of his childhood to attack US left \u2013 but will such language resonate beyond Maga base?
Perhaps above all else, Donald Trump<\/a> is a child of the cold war.
Three months before the US president was born, Winston Churchill delivered a historic speech in Fulton, Missouri,<\/a> that ushered in a generations-long existential struggle between western capitalism and Soviet communism.
Lamenting the spread of Soviet communism across eastern Europe following the allied victory in the second world war, Churchill \u2013 by then no longer British prime minister \u2013 warned his audience on 5 March 1946 that \u201can iron curtain has descended across the continent\u201d.
It was the prelude to a nuclear-armed standoff between Washington and Moscow that triggered a hysteria-driven \u201cred scare\u201d<\/a> in the US \u2013 leading to the execution of convicted spies and exemplified by witch-hunts instigated by the Republican senator Joe McCarthy<\/a>, who claimed he had obtained lists of communist agents working in the state department and other key areas of American life.
The hunt for communists would have been a ubiquitous theme of Trump\u2019s early childhood.
Strikingly, Roy Cohn<\/a> \u2013 McCarthy\u2019s chief counsel, who had masterminded the federal prosecution of the convicted Soviet spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg<\/a>, subsequently executed for treason \u2013 became Trump\u2019s mentor in later decades, as he rose in the New York real-estate world.
\u201cFor many years, communism and communists were the major enemy of the United States,\u201d said Harvey Klehr, an emeritus professor at Emory University and an expert in the US\u2019s history with communism.
\u201cThere were obviously times it might have gotten exaggerated or or got out of hand, but there was a darn good reason for people to be alarmed about it.\u201d
Paranoia waned in relative terms after McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954, but only abated after the collapse of eastern European communist regimes in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later.
Now, 37 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall<\/a> and the end of the cold war, Trump is reviving it.
In a series of high-profile addresses, Trump has identified an ideology that millions of Americans are too young to recall as the US\u2019s biggest threat.
\u201cA generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, 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,\u201d he said in a speech at Mount Rushmore<\/a> on 3 July, on the eve of the US\u2019s 250th birthday.
He vowed to \u201cvanquish communists quickly\u201d and \u201csend them into exile\u201d.
That the topic was no one-off was confirmed by a new 100-page report from the state department published this week, titled Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism.<\/a>
\u201cFor nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,\u201d states the report, claiming that the \u201chighest reaches\u201d of the US government have been \u201cinfiltrated\u201d.
\u201cToday, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.\u201d
The rebirth of anti-communist animus has been fueled by the recent success of Democratic candidates identifying as \u201cdemocratic socialists\u201d \u2013 most notably the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani.<\/a>
A succession of leftwing candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)<\/a> have followed Mamdani\u2019s triumph by winning Democratic primaries, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted the veteran New York representative, Adriano Espaillat, in June.
Chevalier has drawn scrutiny over a now deleted Twitter account <\/a>that praised Marxist ideology and historical communist figures, such as Vladimir Lenin.
Several high-profile Democrats and liberal-leaning figures have ridiculed Trump\u2019s attacks for falsely conflating socialism \u2013 a term which can describe democratic governments in several European countries \u2013 with Soviet-style communism.
\u201cNot subtle: new party line is to associate Communists with every crime, every offense,\u201d wrote<\/a> Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism, on X. \u201cCreate a sense of Communist threat to justify a rightwing crackdown. Old playbook used with coups and Fascist takeovers.\u201d
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative for New York and a member of the DSA, called the communist label \u201cvery silly\u201d.
\u201cThey want to call it communist because they don\u2019t want you to know that Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada \u2013 everybody else \u2013 has it better than us, and we spend the most money for the worst care in the developed world,\u201d she told reporters<\/a>.
Cara Tobe, a spokesperson for the DSA \u2013 asked whether the association\u2019s membership included communists \u2013 said: \u201cOur organization\u2019s dues-paying members range in political beliefs, but we are all united under the banner of democratic socialism.
\u201cIt\u2019s concerning but not surprising that Donald Trump<\/a> would like to send his opponents into exile, because it\u2019s increasingly evident our ideas win with the American people: socialism beats fascism.\u201d
Yet some commentators say Trump\u2019s charge is not baseless.
\u201cThe communist issue is not entirely a bugaboo,\u201d said Klehr, who said the DSA had a \u201cvery significant communist component\u201d.
Formed by Michael Harrington<\/a>, the leftwing activist and writer, in 1982, the DSA was founded under a constitution that excluded members of \u201cdemocratic centralists\u201d organizations \u2013 code for Soviet-style communist parties founded on Lenin\u2019s model.
Klehr said that provision had been repealed \u2013 resulting in an influx of radical new members that he compared to the \u201centryist\u201d infiltration of Britain\u2019s Labour party by the Trotskyite Militant tendency in the early 1980s, which resulted in the adoption of leftwing policies and led to an overwhelming election defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher\u2019s Conservatives. The faction was expelled in 1985 by Labour\u2019s then leader, Neil Kinnock.
\u201cThe DSA has changed, and a significant number of people who unapologetically call themselves Marxist-Leninists or communists have moved into DSA and attained some significant positions,\u201d said Klehr.
Bill Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former White House domestic policy adviser under Bill Clinton, said: \u201cThere are people who\u2019ve been in the DSA for decades and can remember the struggle between the democratic and the undemocratic left, and in particular between communists and socialists, and so they are definite.
\u201cThey are responding to the perception that there are various communist or communist-adjacent factions that have joined the DSA, and that they don\u2019t want to be part of that.\u201d
Two recent articles<\/a> in the Atlantic have highlighted the fierce debate over the credentials of DSA candidates and their potential to be catalysts for an ideological shift within the Democratic party<\/a>.
However, Galston \u2013 a self-proclaimed \u201cred diaper baby\u201d<\/a> whose grandfather stood multiple times as a communist candidate in New York \u2013 questioned the ability of Trump\u2019s \u201ccommunist\u201d tag to resonate beyond his Maga base.
He cited a recent Economist\/YouGov poll<\/a> asking voters how much of a threat communism posed to the US. Some 18% termed it a \u201cmajor threat\u201d and another 25% a \u201cminor threat\u201d, while 33% said it was \u201cnot a threat\u201d.
\u201cTrump is 80 years old, and for him, the epithet \u2018communist\u2019 rolls off his lips quite naturally, because it was part of the conflict with internal communism and the Soviet Union as an external communist foe that was part of his formation,\u201d said Galston.
\u201cOlder Americans, those who do have a memory of the cold war, are more responsive to this alleged threat than are younger Americans. He\u2019s speaking to a political party that is disproportionately supported by older Americans.
\u201cSo one way of looking at this is as part of Trump\u2019s overall strategy of base mobilization. He\u2019s preaching to the choir here and he knows intuitively who makes up that choir.\u201d
Galston also attributed the resurgence of fears of communism to an age-old popular American failure to make fine distinctions in political terminology \u2013 a confusion Trump\u2019s critics say applies to him.
But Klehr argued that the trend signaled a broader threat to democracy and liberal values that he said emanated from the extreme left and far right.
\u201cDonald Trump wouldn\u2019t know a communist from a democratic socialist from a Martian, but there are other very smart people that do understand the difference, and the significance,\u201d he said.
\u201cIt\u2019s the same sort of thing that occurred on the political right not that many years ago, when various kinds of rightwing lunatics, neo-Nazis and racists began to move into the Republican party, they won some primaries, they established a beachhead and they\u2019re still there.
\u201cI think some of that is happening in the Democratic party, and it\u2019s dangerous on both counts. It raises serious concerns for the health of a democratic society.
\u201cThe memory of communism is fading, and yet \u2026 some of the things they call for, it\u2019s like they\u2019ve forgotten the history.\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President harks back to red scare of his childhood to attack US left \u2013 but will such language resonate beyond Maga base?Perhaps above all else, Donald Trump is a child of the cold war.Three months before the US president was born, Winston Churchill delivered a historic speech in Fulton, Missouri, that ushered in a generations-long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":220110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}