For all his talk about defeating “radical left lunatics,” the president seems awfully cozy in their company. In the span of a week, Donald Trump managed to pose for chummy photo ops with New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and Venezuela’s illegitimate leader, Delcy Rodríguez. Last Wednesday, he rounded out his leftist tour de force by kicking off a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Smiling for the camera doesn’t make Trump a socialist — but the White House’s growing corporate portfolio might. And as Republicans scramble to cast themselves as the party of sanity against a rising tide of socialism, Trump’s big-government tendencies are creating another headache for candidates facing an uphill midterm season.
That’s on top of Trump’s dreary fundamentals. Gas prices are up, and his job approval is low. The president’s unpopular Iran war and persistent inflation run counter to his campaign promises of fewer foreign entanglements and a booming economy. Any candidate with an R next to their name will struggle to run on a kitchen-table record.
That leaves the GOP with few options other than to run on its opponents’ weaknesses. Republicans have what should be an easy target: the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America. According to Brookings, this year 24 DSA-backed candidates won either statewide or congressional primaries. Another 99 won primaries for local or state legislative races.
Republicans have pounced accordingly. The National Republican Congressional Committee has said that Democrats will have to “explain away their radical socialist record.” House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain wants to up the ante, proposing a message of “common sense versus communist crazy.”
Hawking terms like “socialist” and “communist” means little without proper explanation. But a democratic socialism that endorses “public ownership” of large corporations and shrinking the workweek “with no reduction in pay or benefits” used to be the kind of nonsense that Republicans could argue against. Today, the GOP could have credibility as the alternative to socialists only if its leader quit acting like one.
The president has never fully taken to Republicans’ traditional commitment to limited government and competitive markets. His light touch on entitlement reform has done little to divert major programs from their path to insolvency. The Social Security trust fund is expected to go insolvent by 2032, with the Medicare hospital fund falling to the same fate by 2033. And Trump’s love of tariffs continues to drive up prices.
Export controls and bloated social spending are lamentably mainstays of American politicking, but small-government Republicans might hope to avoid any more mission creep. That won’t be the case under Trump’s leadership. His White House has normalized the practice of federal corporate ownership. According to the Cato Institute, the administration has 32 companies on its corporate portfolio. The president recently added to that list after striking an oil deal with Rodríguez in Venezuela. The deal gives the Pentagon a stake in roughly one-fifth of the country’s oil reserves.
Chavistas’ taste for meddling in private business isn’t the only thing rubbing off on the president. Trump is engaging in the same kind of political trickery socialists use to gain and keep power. Nothing screams “socialist strongman” quite like banishing critical press. Trump recently barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists from the White House. He’s offering Americans a state-backed alternative: Trump TV.
While savvier socialists buy votes by proposing new social spending, the president outright promised $5,000 victory dividends should his party win the midterms. Even some of the president’s allies couldn’t bring themselves to defend the political stunt.
Trump’s behavior doesn’t just complicate Republicans’ midterm messaging; it’s leading to predictably bad outcomes that are becoming electoral liabilities.
The clearest example is Trump’s protectionism. Though trade issues usually aren’t top of mind in elections, three-quarters of registered voters say tariffs will be important to their vote in November, with 57 percent identifying them as a tax on Americans. As Trump continues to wage his trade war with Canada, it’s notable that Republican Senate candidates from border states such as Maine and New Hampshire skipped the GOP’s midterm convention earlier this month.
If Trump deserves any credit, it’s that his bouts of socialism are more dispositional than hardened ideology. That’s the nicest way of saying the president governs by tantrum. The people won’t vote for my party? Give them a check! The nice Venezuelan socialist is doing everything I say? Cut her a deal! A country is selling us more than we sell them? Slap on some tariffs! The journalists are saying nasty things about me? Lock them out!
But socialist policies are damaging whether they’re coming from committed commies or the toddler in chief. And the real danger of Trump’s behavior is bigger than elections. By pushing the same kind of big-government policies that his party has traditionally reviled, the president risks creating a faux consensus around unworkable issues.
A country with $40 trillion in debt can’t afford two major parties that stand for doling out more cash to Americans. And it certainly can’t afford the economic ruin that would come from state operation of large industries.
But ruin could befall the GOP a lot sooner. Too few Republicans have been willing to call out the president’s forays into socialism. They ought to look beyond the midterms. There are Democrats stumping for free health care, free child care and free college. Republicans can’t top a free-everything platform — but they could be the party that explains why it’s impossible in the first place.
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