Why does Trump keep talking about “communism”?

As he commemorated the 250th anniversary of the United States this weekend, President Donald Trump delivered a speech that echoed a bygone era.

“Communism is a mortal threat to American freedom,” he said at a July 3 event at Mount Rushmore. “This is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

It was one of 14 mentions of “communism” or “communist” in a 30-minute speech. The next day, at a Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall, the president again spent considerable time warning about the specter of “communism,” vowing to a crowd of cheering supporters that “America will never be a communist country.”

Calling his opponents “communists” is shaping up to be Trump’s favored rhetorical counterattack during the midterm election campaign. While victories by democratic socialists in some Democratic congressional and municipal primaries have energized parts of the left — and worried more moderate party leaders — the president and his Republican allies are turning to the age-old tactic of “red hunting.”

“This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a recent appearance on Fox News. “They are communists.”

“It’s communism, it’s socialism, it’s deviations from Marxism,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News on Sunday. “This is communism, and it has led to the murder of innocent people, tens of millions of them in the 20th century alone. We must fight this.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” explains the meaning of words used in the news.

The word “communism”, derived from the French “communisme”, was first used in English around 1840, eight years before German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their “Communist Manifesto”. Broadly speaking, it describes a political ideology that envisions a stateless, classless, and moneyless society and common ownership of property and the means of production.

“Communism” became a derogatory term in American politics and industry in the early 20th century. Militant labor movements, incorporating immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, applied Marxist ideas to the often violent struggles between owners and workers in the United States. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, American officials feared a similar revolution in the United States, while nativists viewed new immigrants as a threat to national security. Widespread anxiety and paranoia manifested itself in the first Red Scare, which saw Palmer’s raids target suspected radicals, anarchists and foreigners.

In the decades that followed, as communist revolutions consolidated not toward an egalitarian utopia but toward totalitarian repression, the Cold War generation associated communism with the regimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro, as well as with memories of cover-up exercises under threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union.

Trump is using the label “communist” against an ascendant group of Democratic candidates and politicians who go no further to the left than by calling themselves democratic socialists. But when the president warns against “communism,” he’s not talking about the specifics of the candidates’ political ideologies, says Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.

Sarat instead says Trump is using the term as shorthand for “anti-American,” signaling to his base that their way of life is under threat. “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or to America,” Trump said in his July 3 speech. “You can be a communist or a patriot. You can’t be both.”

“It’s a general way of saying, ‘These people are not like us; these people are threatening our way of life,'” Sarat adds.

Accusing one’s opponents of communist subversion is a well-known political strategy in the United States.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy became a feared national figure by alleging that communist spies and sympathizers had infiltrated American institutions, jeopardizing people’s reputations and livelihoods and pressuring them to testify about their own or others’ affiliation, alleged or real, with the left. During the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator was largely aided by Roy Cohn, his lead lawyer, who would later become the lawyer and mentor of the young Donald Trump.

Warnings about “pink” sympathies also helped Richard Nixon win a Senate seat in 1950. The label “communist” has also been used historically to discredit civil rights movements: Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was often called a “communist.”

But in 2026, nearly 37 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, will a new Red Scare really pull Trump out of his deep political hole? The pure economic theory of communism is now rarely put into practice, even though the ruthless leaders of hybrid capitalist economies like China and Russia have retained the authoritarian iron fist of their predecessors.

While conservatives campaign against greater state intervention in the economy — despite Trump’s successful calls for U.S. ownership in business — Democrats like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani are more comparable to democratic socialists in Europe, with calls for universal health care, more public housing and an interventionist effort to set transportation and food prices. And since Trump has already called even establishment Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “communists,” Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Ashik Siddique says calling DSA candidates “communists” in the current political moment carries even less weight.

“We feel like the words are sort of losing their meaning and Trump’s attacks on this front are really falling flat,” he says.

“Socialism” is no longer a scary word for many Americans. A Fox News poll released in March found that support for socialism is increasing, with a record 38% saying it would be a good thing for the United States to move away from capitalism. In another Gallup poll, released in September, 66 percent of Democrats said they viewed socialism more positively than capitalism. Independents, who play an important role in swing elections, favored capitalism over socialism 51% to 31%.

And for another, younger generation, even “communism” is not so scary. More than a third of Americans under 30 (38%) say they have a favorable view of communism – a figure close to the 45% who say they have a favorable view of capitalism, according to a poll by the libertarian Cato Institute. (The same cohort likes socialism even more, with 53% of Gen Z respondents reporting a favorable view.)

However, for the midterm elections, Trump is likely betting that older voters will be swayed by threats of “communism” and will be more likely than younger people to vote, says Republican strategist John Feehery: “He wants to get older people to vote. »

Researcher Dalton Bouzek conducted a study of “red baiting” rhetoric during congressional campaigns in 2020 and found that such language was not correlated with those candidates winning elections — although he said it led to more online engagement.

“These terms are used because there is still very little public consensus about what they mean,” says Bouzek, a professor of social media at SUNY Brockport. “And if they can be easily weaponized, if they are easily recognizable terms that people are already primed to feel one way or another, they will use them to their advantage.”

Despite the long history of American politicians harassing their opponents, the tactic has not always worked in candidates’ favor.

When Barry Goldwater accused Lyndon B. Johnson of being soft on communism, it backfired: LBJ released the famous “Daisy” ad, which featured a young girl picking petals in the countdown to a nuclear holocaust. The implication was that a vote for the conservative Republican would lead to a nuclear holocaust.

As Trump uses the words “communism” and “communist” against his opponents without regard for their meaning, Bouzek wonders if that could also backfire on him, potentially leading young people to associate those words with an anti-Trump philosophy.

“I could imagine a world where this backfired on Trump and people became more receptive to the idea of ​​the left,” he says.

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