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With the midterm elections approaching, President Trump hit upon a message that could turn a potential blowout for Republicans into an unexpected win. Deploying his two favorite emotions — hate and fear — he used his bully pulpit to flood the media with warnings about a dire threat to all that Americans hold dear.
It was 2018, and the threat was “caravans” of migrants heading through Central America, supposedly on their way to lay waste to our nation and even murder you and your family.
But despite Trump’s unmatched ability to seize public attention, the voters just didn’t buy it, and the sweeping Democratic victory that had been predicted came to pass.
With this year’s midterms just four months away, Trump is trying it again. But instead of migrant caravans, this year’s terrifying menace is … communism!
Given how Trump has moved the word into such heavy rotation, it deserves the exclamation point. In a series of recent speeches, not to mention his off-the-cuff remarks to reporters, Trump has brought up communism dozens of times, in both broad terms (“America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen. Communism is a loser, and it always will be”) and specifically with regard to the opposition.
Democrats, Trump claims, “are turning communist themselves. It’s becoming a communist party. These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists. They’re godless communists.”
Other Republicans are following his lead. According to the Washington Post, mentions of “communism” from prominent conservatives on podcasts and social media are up 43 percent so far this year, and that will only increase as Trump continues his red-baiting.
If the rhetoric sounds outdated, that may be because in Trump’s mind it’s still the 1980s, when the dashing young real estate investor was all over the tabloid gossip pages and Ronald Reagan was taking it to the Russkies. But for most Americans, communism is a story out of history books or a fading memory.
You’d have to be at least 50 to have been aware of communism when the Warsaw Pact still existed — which excludes almost two-thirds of Americans. Of the few remaining communist countries, China is in some ways more capitalist than we are, and no one sees Cuba or North Korea as a threat to take over America.
Three cheers for capitalism?
Nevertheless, Trump always argues that external adversaries pale next to the terrifying threat from within — that is, Americans who don’t support him. Now he’s presenting voters with a syllogism: There is an ascendant wing of populist leftists within the Democratic Party, some of whom call themselves socialist; those Democrats are actually not socialists but communists; therefore all Democrats are communists.
It’s ludicrous, sure — but so are many arguments Trump has made, some of which were persuasive to significant numbers of voters. But refighting the grand battle between communism and capitalism won’t be easy.
First, that particular argument ended decades ago, and capitalism pretty much won. Even the Americans who today call themselves “socialist” or “democratic socialist” are mostly Scandinavian-style social democr