President Trump knows that he is unpopular.
This is why he’s become even more obsessed with election fraud; why he fumed and rambled about the 2020 election for a prime-time audience last week; and why he wants Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that — in his mind — would make it impossible for Democrats to win the midterm elections.
This is why both he and his Republican allies are throwing everything they have at Democrats in an attempt to find a message that sticks with the public, a message that could help them hold Congress for another two years. And what Trump and the Republican Party have settled on to spearhead their campaign against the Democratic Party is the threat of communism.
That’s right: communism. It is unclear exactly what Trump has in mind when he says “communism,” although there is no reason to think that the president could distinguish Marxism-Leninism from Maoism or Trotskyism or some other more boutique formulation. Whatever his meaning, the important point is that communism is, to the president, the single greatest threat to the safety, prosperity and integrity of the United States.
“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” he said at a semi-quincentennial event at Mount Rushmore on July 3. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”
The next day, in his Independence Day speech on the National Mall, Trump was even more emphatic about the threat communism poses. “The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked,” he said. “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.”
Following the president’s direction, Republican leaders in Congress have also pledged to fight the Red menace, tying it explicitly to the Democratic Party. “The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, said. One imagines that we’ll soon see Republicans quoting Alexander Kolchak and waving the banner of the White Army.
It is clear that all of this is a response to the recent success of insurgent left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries, especially those with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America. These candidates, who won Democratic primaries — most recently Melat Kiros of Colorado — are not communists. D.S.A.’s origins, in fact, lie in part with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, whose leadership came from the anti-communist left. But it is perhaps too much to expect American conservatives to distinguish between the many flavors of left-wing politics in the United States.
In any case, Republicans hope to wield the public’s longstanding hostility to socialism as a weapon against Democratic Party politicians, whether or not they fall on the left or call themselves democratic socialists. (And if the recent activities of Marco Rubio and the State Department are any indication, the administration also wants to wield the specter of communism as it makes its plans for Cuba.)
But Americans are neither as hostile to socialism as they once were nor as positive toward capitalism as they have been in the past. More important than polling, however, is the fact that for many Americans the “communist threat” is a total abstraction. There are tens of millions of voters (this columnist included) who were young children when the Soviet Union fell. There are millions more who weren’t yet born. For these Americans, “communism” is as much a concern as “the missile gap” or the Contras. It is completely unresponsive to the circumstances of their lives — to their struggles with housing, health care and the overall cost of living. As a message, “communism” is out of touch with reality; more likely to drive voters away from Trump and the Republican Party than push them into their arms.
It is fitting that Trump, a student of Roy Cohn, would turn to Red-baiting as he fights for political survival. Cohn was a prosecutor in the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, where he played a major role in McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts. The president, who isn’t known for his embrace of new ideas, might see anti-communism as an easy path to victory.
What’s more, Trump’s turn to Cold War-era rhetoric, and specifically that of the Second Red Scare, is of a piece with the overall dynamic of his administration.
You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.
The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.
The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Its racist nativism is a throwback to both the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — which it recently defended in its tendentious critique of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively closed the country to African, Asian and Southern and Eastern European immigrants for more than 40 years. Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
Of course this president, and this administration, would want to emulate the anti-communist hysterias of the 1910s and the 1950s. Of course he and his administration would want to resurrect the fear, bitterness and paranoia that marked the hunt for alleged subversives.
Both Trump and his movement are, as you might surmise from the slogan “Make America Great Again,” fundamentally derivative. His vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past.
The president’s attempt to drum up a third Red Scare is certain to fail. If it matters — if it is interesting — it is only because it gives us a glimpse into the stunted imagination of a man who seems to value only the worst this country has to offer.
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