How to parse the Trumpists’ retro-1950s rhetoric

The Republican Party’s turn to blatant, 1950s style Anti-Communism is a real flashback to the days when Donald Trump’s future mentor Roy Cohn was the chief council for Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunting Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

It’s worth recalling how a onetime Hollywood union leader, Ronald Reagan, happily embraced redbaiting political rhetoric himself and used it to oppose what he considered a dangerous socialist program. That is, Medicare, which was enacted in 1965.

As Jon Schwarz recalls in a 2015 article for The Intercept on the 50th anniversary of the very successful Medicare program (1), Reagan made a recording in 1961 on a leading communication technology of the time - a vinyl record album - in which he warned about the danger of impending tyranny represented by the dastardly Medicare idea. Schwarz characterized it as “completely nuts.” Thanks to more recent technological advances in media that produced YouTube, we can conveniently judge it ourselves.

On the vinyl record, Reagan said:

[The Truman Administration] proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this. So with the American people on record as not wanting socialized medicine, [Democratic supporters promoted] the idea that all people of Social Security age should be brought under a program of compulsory health insurance.

Reagan explained why this whole idea was a devious Socialist plan:

[O]ne of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it now.

Medicare became law in the US over 60 years ago along with Medicaid. It’s safe to say it is still very popular. As is the idea of Medicare for All.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) published this graphic in 1946 in support of Truman’s national health insurance plan:

Yes, Harry Truman was proposing what we now call Medicare for All!

The Democrats today could bait the Republicans by finding some crank GOP Member of Congress who once said something about how if we don’t get rid of Medicare, the US will be a socialist dictatorship in five years’ time. Throw in Rand Paul’s 2025 proposal on his X account to raise the full Social Security retirement age to 70. And make that a major talking point against the Republicans from now through 2028.

Making a major theme of the idea that Republicans want to flush Medicare down the toilet is something that would catch the attention of most every voter who doesn’t live in a basement spending every day reading decades-old John Birch Society pamphlets!

This post originally appeared on the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Schwarz, Jon (2015): Medicare Celebrates Its 50th Birthday, Despite Ronald Reagan. The Intercept 07/30/2015. <https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/medicares-50th-birthday-lets-forget-ronald-reagans-insane-diatribe-trying-stop/> (Accessed: 2026-27-08).

(2) Ronald Reagan speaks out on Socialized Medicine – Audio. Reagan Presidential Foundation YouTube channel 07/23/2009. <https://youtu.be/AYrlDlrLDSQ?si=ZKnMdD7FTLI0MuFQ> (Accessed: 2026-23-08).

(3) For the People’s Health. Economic Outlook (CIO) April 1946. <http://recordsofrights.org/assets/record/000/000/579/579_original.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-23-08).