TrumpCarthyism, 2026

In a presentation I embedded in a previous post, historian Heather Cox Richardson talked about how anticommunism became a particular polemical tool in US politics. (1)

Trump’s address on July 16 about voting reminded me of how much he’s a re-run of his mob-lawyer mentor, Roy Cohn (1927-1986), who also had served as chief counsel for Joe McCarthy’s infamous Senate witch-hunt committee.

Trump's mentor would have been proud of his protégé’s speech last night. McCarthy focused heavily on alleged collusion by officials with Chinese Communists. Now Trump is saying Chinese Commies are subverting our elections.

So, we have China to blame for Trump getting elected again in 2024?

A reporter once asked Harry Truman if he had heard a comment McCarthy had just made. His response: "I don't know anything about it, but if McCarthy said it, it's a damn lie, you can be sure of that." (2)

That’s a good standard for Trump‘s claims, too!

Starting just after 25:00 in this July 9 video, Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that the politics of “anticommunism” in the US predate the Bolshevik Revolution. And, not surprisingly, the 19th century version had much to do with white racism. And so does the Donald Trump 2026 version.

(27:36) But then you also have what people are looking at with this idea of left-wing terrorism that the administration is pushing and that's the attempt to criminalize the idea of political opposition to Trump with the argument that those people who are standing against him are communists.

Now I want to call out here there is something circulating on social media saying that it looks like a Trump post from Truth Social and it looks like he is saying he's going to put communists in jail. That is fake. That is not real.

All right. It looks real. It is not real. And if you see things like that and people are reacting hugely to this because it's not outside the realm of possibility. ...

Facts matter, as Richardson’s comment there reminds us.

Now, that being said, Trump very clearly is doubling down on the idea that his opponents are communists. This is really interesting from a psychological perspective for Trump because Trump really, if you think about him, which I have done more than I want to, let me tell you. But his great moment in the sun, you know, the moment when he was on top of the world was the 1980s. And much of his mindset remains in the 1980s. and his glee with which he has glommed onto the word “communists” in this moment just strikes me once again of him being back in the 1980s and ever so happy to be there.

But for the rest of us, the threat of communism is just gone. I mean the for most Americans at this point you don't even haven't really lived in a you in a world that was dominated by the great Communist powers and even powers that are nominally Communist now are really not fully Communist any longer but he clearly thinks that that's such a frightening word that people will react crazily to it. And this is interesting for me because the idea of communism and socialism in the United States is very different than it is in … the concept of international communism.

This shouldn’t be taken as a reason to credit Trumpista anticommunism with some kind of goodwill in their effort to make Medicare For All sound like the Second Coming of Pol Pot. It’s just as sleazy and dishonest as Joe McCarthy’s and Roy Cohn’s demagoguery.

We start to see people complaining about socialism and communism in the United States in 1871. That's before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. 1871, and it comes out of the American South where white Democrats, formerly Confederates, don't want black voting. And what they say is that black, it's men at this point, black men are uneducated and they are poor. And if you let them vote, they're going to vote for politicians who will promise them roads and schools and hospitals and so on. And those can only be paid for by tax dollars. And because only white people have any property, that's going to mean a redistribution of wealth from white people to black people. And that's socialism.

And after the Paris Commune of March through May of 1871, they begin to call it communism. This is long before uh people are talking about imposing Marxists governments on the rest of the world. But in the United States, those ideas of socialism and communism went back to the idea of minority voting, racial minorities voting. And I think Trump - unconsciously, because I know he doesn't know this history - is tapping into that. Basically, it's something that an embattled white group of people has rolled out every time they want to make sure that minorities can't vote.

And she takes up one of my own pet peeves:

So, one of the things that you people ask me about every single week is that's that you know, old chestnut. We're not a democracy. We're a republic. Why is that? Where did that come from?

That comes from the John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s when they were trying to justify not permitting black voting in the United States. And what did they say? They said that black Americans were communists.

Now, in that period, there is overlap between communism and certain black activists in the United States. But there that's really not what the heart of that that equation is. Nonetheless, I think what Trump is doing when he talks about communism is he's basically saying us white guys have to stick together because anybody who's complaining about anything I do is one of them guys, right? And all the things that you can shovel into that bucket of Communism.

So, one of the things that people are identifying with this push for the White House to go after leftwing terrorism is to take opponents of Trump, those he is now calling communists and that he identified in September of 2025 as being terrorists, put them all together and use the American government to go after them. And that is a very, very real issue. You saw that in the Broadview 6. You saw that in the Prairie Land case where they took people who were simply protesting ICE, said they were a conspiracy and tried to throw the book at them, even if they didn't know each other, for being part of a conspiracy.

And that's dangerous. That is out there. And that's probably part of what's going on. It's not fairing well in the courts, by the way, with the exception of the Prairieland case, which is going to be appealed for sure because it's bonkers.  [my emphasis]

The Prairieland case to which she refers is the case in which protesters at an ICE facility in Texas which the Trump Administration charged protesters with felonies to use it as a model case for their efforts to declare all anti-Trump dissenters as part of an “antifa” terrorist conspiracy. As AP reports:

President Donald Trump last fall signed an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization, even though there is no domestic equivalent to the State Department's list of foreign terror organizations.

Critics warn the case could have wide-reaching impact on protests given that organizations operating within the U.S. are supposed to be protected by First Amendment free-speech rights.

Short for "anti-fascists," antifa is not a single organization but rather an umbrella term for far-left militant groups that confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations. (3)

In some ways, this is also a rerun of the McCarthy era because here we again having a particular organization being defined as a terrorist conspiracy or something similar. At least the post-World War II Red Scare had an actual (if small) organization, the Communist Party (CPUSA) out of which to construct a bogeyman. (4) Trump 2.0’s designation of “antifa” protesters as a some nationwide organization is completely bogus.

But the McCarran Act (Subversive Activities Control Act) of 1950 and the Communist Control Act (CCA) of 1954. The latter was sponsored by Congressman Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who is generally remembered as some kind of liberal. The official name of the Minnesota Democratic Party, then and now, is the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL). The New York Times explained the year the CCA was passed:

The bill that has now become known as “the Communist Control Act of 1954” was promoted as a political coup by so-called Democratic “liberals” headed by Senator Humphrey of Minnesota, who is running for re-election this fall. The Democrats had been goaded for months, even years, by Republican demagogues charging them with “twenty years of treason” and the like; and this time they apparently decided that they could out-demagogue the Republicans. (5)

It was 1954, so the ultra-respectable New York Times saw the need to add this qualification:

In the present atmosphere, the Democrats reasoned, they would get credit for being more anti-Communist than the Republicans because they were proposing legislation superficially even more anti-Communist than anything the Republicans had come up with.

This was the same we’re-more-rightwing-than-the-Republicans tactic that Kamala Harris applied in her 2024 campaign to immigration enforcement, where her message was essentially: We’re trying to get more aggressive against all these here illegal aliens, but the soft-on-immigration Republicans won’t let us!

Returning to Harry Truman, he famously said in 1952:

I've seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don't want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign. [my emphasis] (6)

Notes:

(1) Today in Politics-Explainer. Heather Cox Richardson YouTube channel 07/09/2026. <https://youtu.be/bxEawcvCle4?si=WMdkrG_F65NwgWr3> (Accessed: 2026-13-07).

(2) Truman 'Worried' Taft Is Losing; Reaffirms His Civil Rights Stand; TRUMAN 'WORRIED' ON TAFT'S CHANCES. New York Times 07/10/1952. <https://www.nytimes.com/1952/07/10/archives/truman-worried-taft-is-losing-reaffirms-his-civil-rights-stand.html> (Accessed: 2026-17-07).

(3) Stengle, Jamie & Marcelo, Philip (2026): 8 convicted of terrorism charges in Texas immigration center shooting sentenced to decades in prison. AP/PBS 06/23/2026. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/8-convicted-of-terrorism-charges-in-texas-immigration-center-shooting-sentenced-to-decades-in-prison> (Accessed: 2026-17-07).

(4) This is not to imply that the legal actions and Red Scare measures taken were justified. 

(5) The Communist Control Act. New York Times 08/21/1954. <https://www.nytimes.com/1954/08/21/archives/the-communist-control-act.html> (Accessed: 2026-17-07).

(6) Truman, Harry (1952): Address at the National Convention Banquet of the Americans for Democratic Action 05/17/1952. The American Presidency Project. <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-national-convention-banquet-the-americans-for-democratic-action> (Accessed: 2026-17-07).