Opinion | Why Donald Trump Says His Enemies Are ‘Communists’

More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump seems determined to resurrect red baiting as a political tactic. Calling his political opponents communists has become a regular feature of Trump’s attacks on the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, and the likes of George Soros.

Using this tactic, Trump hopes that a single word can discredit their political views. He wants his followers to fear what the people and institutions he calls communist will do to those who don’t share their world view — including to the former president himself.

Trump’s effort to brand his political opponents and those who now would hold him to account for his alleged criminal conduct as communists has been a through line of his rhetoric since he became a major political figure in 2015. In October of that year, he called Sen. Bernie Sanders, then a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, “a socialist-slash-communist ... He's going to tax you people at 90 percent; he's going to take everything!”

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 expand on his anti-communist crusade. “Socialism and communism,” Trump said, “are not about justice. They are not about equality. They are not about lifting up the poor. They are certainly not about the good of the country. Socialism and communism are about one thing only — power for the ruling class.”

“America,” Trump promised, “will never be a socialist country.”

At a September 2020 White House event honoring Cuban-American veterans of the ill-fated, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba Trump repeated that promise and branded his political opponents radical “Marxists.”

“When 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.”

During his 2020 reelection campaign he told a rally of supporters in Vandalia, Ohio, “The choice in November is going to be very simple. There's never been a time when there's been such a difference. One is probably communism. I don't know. They keep saying socialism. I think they've gone over that one. That one's passed already.”

Three years later, reviving the Red Scare also is part of Trump’s 2024 electoral strategy. It works for at least three reasons.

First, it is designed to appeal to older voters who remember the days when the phrase “Better Dead Than Red” signaled solidarity among white people in this country against a common enemy. Polls show that only 3 percent of people in their 70s and older have a favorable view of communism as opposed to 28 percent among Gen Z.

Second, it stirs up fears of China, today’s most prominent and powerful communist nation.

Finally, this language has special meaning in South Florida, where the former president is under federal indictment. It’s 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 allegedly poses.

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

It is noteworthy that in his post-indictment speech he linked what was happening to him with a litany of familiar, polarizing, conservative culture war issues. If they get me, he suggested to supporters, they will soon be after you. And that message seemed to get through, with some of his MAGA allies quickly joining Trump in blaming communists for his legal troubles. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, said the indictment was the product of “CORRUPT AND WEAPONIZED COMMUNISTS DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED DOJ.”

The former president is hitting the Red Scare hard now in the hope of influencing his forthcoming trial. Because the jury in the classified documents case is going to be from Miami, haven for Cuban-Americans and immigrants from socialist-dominated Venezuela, he hopes to appeal to potential jurors who might stand in the way of a conviction. What better way to win their sympathy than to suggest that his prosecution is part of a communist conspiracy?

As Harvard professor Steven Levitsky argues, for many Americans, Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric “just sounds silly… But (for) people who are either descendants of Cuban exiles or actual Venezuelan exiles — that actually struck some chord.”

And news reports suggest that Trump is indeed appealing to a receptive audience. An Associated Press story last week noted that “For some Hispanic Trump supporters who gathered outside the federal courthouse in Miami where the former president was arraigned, the charges evoked memories of political persecutions their family members had once escaped.”

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

Whatever his motivations, Trump’s kind of red baiting has a long lineage. It is right out of the playbook of authoritarians and tyrants from the early 20th century. It was instrumental in the rise of fascist leaders in mid-century Germany and Italy.

Like them, today’s strongmen and would-be strongmen like the former president need powerful “us” versus “them” narratives, and communism is a tried and true boogeyman. It works, as columnist John P. Baird has argued, “to narrow the spectrum of what it is possible to achieve politically. It has historically been used against all kinds of change agents.”

Trump’s revival of the Red Scare also draws on an American tradition that fueled the notorious Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920, when the Justice Department arrested and deported anarchists, communists, and radical leftists. The raids, sparked by social unrest following the First World War, were the climax of that era’s own Red Scare.

Trump is surely 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 alleged that numerous 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 persists in trying to bring back the Red Scare even though, as the journalist Ed Kilgore notes, “There is not a single Democratic political figure in the United States who espouses anything resembling communism.”

Trump is “hallucinating” a communist threat where there is none and promoting what The Guardian columnist Richard Seymour labels “anti-communism without communism.” Seymour gets it right when he suggests that for a would-be authoritarian like Trump, communism signals a “single, treasonous, diabolical enemy.” “Rather like a racial stereotype,” Seymour wrote, “‘communism’ figuratively presents systemic crisis as … a demonic plot … Those labelled ‘communists’ are thus blamed not just for the reforms they demand, but for all the crises that call for reform.”

By conjuring such demonic forces, Trump amplifies his anti-democratic claim that, as he put it in his post-indictment speech, “I am the only one that can save this nation.”