Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of ‘communist menace’ | Donald Trump
Perhaps above all, Donald Trump is a child of the cold war.
Three months before the US president was born, Winston Churchill gave a speech. Historic speech in Fulton, Missouri, This marked the beginning of an existential struggle between Western capitalism and Soviet communism that would last for generations.
Lamenting the spread of Soviet communism across Eastern Europe following the Allied victory in the Second World War, Churchill – then no longer British prime minister – warned his audience on 5 March 1946 that “an iron curtain has descended on the continent”.
This was the beginning of a nuclear armed conflict between Washington and Moscow, triggering a conflict based on hysteria. “red fear” In the United States – an incident that led to the execution of convicted spies and culminated in witch hunts initiated by a Republican senator Joe McCarthyWho claimed to have obtained lists of communist agents working in the State Department and other important areas of American life.
Hunting communists was a pervasive theme of Trump’s early childhood.
strikingly, Roy Cohn – McCarthy’s lead lawyer, who planned the federal investigation into convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel RosenbergTrump, who was later executed for treason, became Trump’s mentor as he rose in the New York real estate world in later years.
“For many years, communism and communists were the greatest enemies of the United States,” said Harvey Klehr, a professor emeritus at Emory University and an expert on the U.S. history of communism.
“Of course there were times when it was exaggerated or out of control, but there was a very good reason for people to panic about it.”
Paranoia abated in relative terms after McCarthy was condemned by the Senate in 1954, but only abated after the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.
Now, 37 years later Fall of the Berlin Wall and with the end of the Cold War, Trump is reviving it.
In a series of high-profile speeches, Trump has described as the United States’ greatest threat an ideology that millions of Americans are too young to remember.
“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the danger of communism, the communist threat is resurgent on our soil, including newcomers to our country who espouse ideas diametrically opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said in a speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, on the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday.
He promised to “quickly destroy the Communists” and “drive them into exile.”
That the issue was not a one-off was confirmed in a new 100-page report released by the State Department this week. Cuba: Capital of 21st Century Communism.
The report states, “For nearly seventy years, the Cuban regime has been waging a continuous campaign of destruction against the United States” and claims that the “highest levels” of the US government have been “infiltrated”.
“Today, this network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations in the United States.”
The resurgence of anti-communist hostility has been fueled by the recent success of Democratic candidates who describe themselves as “democratic socialists,” most notably New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Supported by a number of leftist candidates Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Mamdani followed up her victory with wins in the Democratic primary, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, who unseated veteran New York representative Adriano Espaillat in June.
Chevalier examined a now-deleted file Twitter account An article praising Marxist ideology and historical communist figures such as Vladimir Lenin.
Many high-profile Democrats and liberal-leaning figures have mocked Trump’s attacks for incorrectly conflating socialism, a term that can describe democratic governments in many European countries, with Soviet-style communism.
“It’s not subtle: the new party line is to associate communists with every crime, every crime.” wrote Historian of Fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat says of X: “Create a sense of Communist threat to justify right-wing repression. The old playbook for coups and Fascist takeovers.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York’s Democratic representative and DSA member, called the communist label “so stupid.”
“They want to call it communist because they don’t want you to know that Germany, Italy, England, Canada (everyone else) is better off than us and we spend the most money on the worst care in the developed world,” he said. he told reporters.
DSA spokeswoman Cara Tobe asked whether the association’s membership includes communists: “Dues-paying members of our organization hold different political views, but we are all united under the banner of democratic socialism.
“It is alarming but not surprising that Donald Trump wants to exile his opponents, because it is increasingly clear that our ideas are winning in the eyes of the American people: socialism defeats fascism.”
But some commentators say Trump’s accusation is not unfounded.
Saying that DSA has a “very significant communist component”, Klehr said: “The communist issue is not a complete nonsense.”
created by Michael HarringtonLeft-wing activist and writer DSA was founded in 1982 under a constitution that excluded members of “democratic centrist” organizations, code for Soviet-style communist parties based on Lenin’s model.
Klehr said that this provision was repealed; this led to an influx of radical new members, which he compared to the “entrepreneurial” infiltration of the British Labor Party by the Trotskyist Militant tendency in the early 1980s; this resulted in the adoption of left-wing policies and led to a crushing election defeat by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. The group was expelled in 1985 by the then leader of the Labor Party, Neil Kinnock.
“DSA has changed, and a significant number of people who call themselves Marxist-Leninists or communists have moved to DSA and reached some important positions,” Klehr said.
Bill Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow and former White House domestic policy adviser under Bill Clinton, said: “There are people who have been at DSA for decades who can remember the struggle between the democratic and undemocratic left, particularly between the communists and the socialists, and so they are certain.
“They are responding to the perception that various communist or communist-adjacent groups have joined the DSA and they don’t want to be a part of it.”
Two latest articles The Atlantic was highlighted by a fierce debate over the credentials of DSA candidates and their potential as catalysts. An ideological shift within the Democratic Party.
However, Galston finds himself a “red diaper baby” He questioned the ability of Trump’s “communist” label to resonate beyond Maga’s base, whose grandfather came forward multiple times as a communist candidate in New York.
He quoted a recent Economist/YouGov poll asked voters how big a threat communism posed to the United States. 18 percent described it as a “major threat”, 25 percent as a “minor threat”, while 33 percent said it was “not a threat”.
“Trump is 80 years old, and for him the adjective ‘communist’ rolls off his lips quite naturally, because it was part of the conflict with internal communism and the Soviet Union as the external communist enemy that was part of its genesis,” Galston said.
“Older Americans with memories of the Cold War are more susceptible to this alleged threat than younger Americans. It speaks to a political party that is disproportionately supported by older Americans.”
“So one way to look at this is as part of Trump’s overall strategy to mobilize the base. He’s preaching to the choir here, and he knows intuitively who makes up that choir.”
Galston also attributed the revival of fears of communism to Americans’ previous failure to make fine distinctions in political terminology; This confusion, Trump’s critics say, applies to him as well.
But Klehr argued that this trend points to a broader threat to democracy and liberal values that he says emanates from the far left and far right.
“Donald Trump cannot tell a Martian between a communist and a democratic socialist, but there are other very smart people who understand the difference and its importance,” he said.
“This is the same kind of thing that happened on the political right not too long ago, when various right-wing lunatics, neo-Nazis, and racists began to enter the Republican Party, won some primaries, established a foothold, and are still there.
“I think this is happening in the Democratic Party, too, and it’s dangerous on both counts. It raises serious concerns for the health of a democratic society.”
“The memory of communism is fading, but still… it seems like they have forgotten the history of some of the things they were demanding.”
