“Anti-Communism” in the Trump 2.0 era politics

Trump’s use of “communism” to describe all Democrats is an indication that he intends to use the politics of “anti-Communism” extensively in his authoritarian, anti-democracy project this year. It’s important to know that the politics of Anti-Communism in the United States was historically not primarily directed against people and political groups that identified themselves as communists. Although to the extent they could find actual, self-identified Communists to trash, they were happy to do that, too.

Time magazine has a recent piece by staff writer Nik Popli that can serve as an example of lazy popular media accounts may treat the topic. (1)

The only surprising thing about Popli’s piece is that it notes, “Trump came of age during that period [of “anti-communist politics of the Cold War and the Red Scare” in the 1950s] and was mentored by Roy Cohn, who served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the infamous anti-communist hearings of the 1950s.”

“Coming of age” usually references a young person reaching adulthood. Trump was born in 1946. The beginning of “McCarthyism” is typically dated to February 1950 when the sleazy Senator from Wisconsin managed to grab national publicity for his claims that the State Department was full of Communists. Although he continued to serve in the Senate until 1957, when he passed away with cirrhosis of the liver, his ability to generate national headlines had crashed and burned when the Senate censured him 67-22 in December of 1954. Trump didn’t reach the age of 21 - then still the typical minimal voting age in the US - until 1967.

For a detailed primer on McCarthy and McCarthyism, see Thomas Reeves’ 1982 book, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography.

Popli uses a sane-washing description of the Trumpistas’ current usage:

Progressive candidates have argued that addressing affordability requires expanding government-funded programs, raising taxes on wealthy Americans, and strengthening labor protections - positions Republicans increasingly characterize as evidence that the party is embracing socialism or even communism.” (my emphasis)

This would define even the famously reactionary 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck as a socialist and/or communist. But then, in a campaign context, trying to explain who Bismarck was, much less what his idea of a reactionary welfare state was, would fall flat. Although any history geeks in the audience would enjoy the reference.

Here, the formulation linguist George Lakoff used as an example of how not to frame a defense against an accusation is helpful: “Don’t think of an elephant.” Because if you mention an elephant, you automatically invoke the image of an elephant in the hearer’s mind. He applied that concept in a 2004 book, Don’t Think of An Elephant! which is available in the Internet Archive. There he introduces the concept this way:

Every word like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. The world is defined relative to that frame. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame.

Richard Nixon found that out the hard way. While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, Nixon addressed the nation on TV. He stood before the nation and said, “I am not a crook.” And everybody thought about him as a crook.

This gives us a basic principle of framing, for when you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame – and it won’t be the frame you want.

In a pair of articles in 2023, he applied this perspective to combatting critics of “woke.” (3)

The anti-“woke” whining from conservative Asleepists is basically a variation of 1950s style redbaiting. Dig into the far right “anti-woke” polemics and you’ll see they claim that a bunch of Jewish Commies started the whole thing. And that is also as frivolous of McCarthy’s typical accusations. (4)

Lakoff was addressing this in the context of political speech and campaigning, i.e., political persuasion or propaganda. In the context of analyzing the framing of “anticommunism” as political rhetoric like this piece, it’s obvious that we have to use the term. He would presumably think that when a candidate it would not be his recommended approach to respond to accusations that he/she is a Communist to say, “No, a communist is x, y, and z, and I’m not any of those things.” Because that reinforces the opponent’s theme.

But responding with a more contemptuous counter like, “You wouldn’t know a communist if one bit you in the leg,” conveys the message, “You’re a liar and a dumbass,” without directly reinforcing the hostile framing. Now, if one party to the debate is a stark raving libertarian or Peter Thiel disciple, they might actually say, “Social Security is a communist program.” In which case the Democratic participant would think, okay, my work here is done!

Nik Popli in his Time piece shows little understanding how this works. For instance, he writes, “There are also no members of Congress who openly identify as members of the Communist Party, and no Communist Party candidate has won state or federal office in modern American history.” (my emphasis) I would classify that as red-baiting-lite, e.g.: none of these Dems say they’re Communists, but those Reds are pretty devious people, you know. (“Reds” in the McCarthy era referred to Communists, not Republicans.)

Do Time’s editors think there is a party in the US that would be generally identified as “the Communist Party”? Presumably Popli is referring to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), which does exist. That party goes back to the time of its founders, which included the journalist John Reed, as depicted in the 1981 film Reds, in which Reed was played by Warren Beatty. Its active adherents probably number in the thousands today and their direct influence on electoral politics is negligible.

But in the context of political messaging, especially in the electoral context, saying what my previous paragraph says would be falling into the messaging trap that Lakoff warned against. Because it takes sloppy journalism repeating a Republican framing as though it were serious journalism.

Another “tell” in Popli’s article indicating he’s trying to make the 2026 version of McCarthyism sound respectable is that he quotes Matt Bennett, who he identifies as “a co-founder of the centrist Democratic organization Third Way.” Third Way is basically a mouthpiece for corporate neoliberalism. To call them “centrist” is almost an insult to lazy centrists everywhere.

The New York Times has helpfully (?) provided us with an interview with the current Third Way president, Jon Cowan, in which he pretty much defines any Democrat who is serious about fighting Republicans as a seedy leftist: “Some of it is on policy. If you are for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, abolishing ICE, open borders, you’re a lefty. And those things will really haunt you in a general election.” (5)

Did you catch that? The Green New Deal was a signature Joe Biden priority. So, Biden’s a Commie!!!

Who do you appeal to? What’s your brand and approach in politics? Are you more pragmatic? Do you have an unabashed love of the country? [Or] are you kind of hypercritical of America? Are you willing to pick a range of fights, not just the fights that are really safe and convenient? What’s your track record, also, with winning over swing voters? ...

What it means, ultimately, is influencing all of the people who will run for president who are anywhere from the kind of mushy to more moderate. Not the lefties, but everybody else.

Influencing them, and all the concentric circles around them. Not just their teams and their operatives, but all the key people in the early primary and presidential battleground states. People in media, on social media, etc. Creating a highly persuasive case that we market very widely throughout the Democratic Party, not just in Washington but around the country, so that people believe there is one way to win in ’28, and that is by nominating somebody who can win over that middle, and rejecting anybody from the far left. [my emphasis]

Good Lord, these people are tiresome!

The word “Republican” does not appear in the printed interview. Because Third Way is about defeating actual Democrats, not about defeating Republicans. Much less about campaigning for anything that is actually constructive for people who aren’t billionaires.

A 1998 opinion piece by the late historian Tony Judt defined the neoliberal “third way” concept like this:

Each age has its cliche. Ours is the "third way." Hardly a week passes without a public figure in Britain, Germany or the United States hailing the coming of the third way: the new, "post-ideological" approach to politics and policy making. Sociologists theorize about it, policy seminars promote it, Presidents and prime ministers bask in the reflected glory of its modest ambitions. No reasonable person can dissent; the bad old days of big projects, of left and right, are gone for good. The political goals of the third way are small goals -- and in the cliche of an earlier age, small is beautiful.

Much of this is humbug, of course. In the English-speaking world the third way is just a new label for an old electoral tactic -- ''triangulating'' between ideas and voters to maximize short-term advantage. Tony Blair's Government -- the European reference for contemporary effusions about a third way -- is the natural child of Margaret Thatcher (much as Reagan begat Clinton). She swung the political pendulum so aggressively against compassion and government intervention that for the first time a government of the "left" could occupy ground somewhere to the right of center and get credit for radical intentions just by standing still and emoting fuzzily. New Labor's third way is opportunism with a human face. [my emphasis] (6)

And Judt seems to have been trying to be generous!

In the ensuing 18 years, the American version of the “third way” has descended into sad hackery.

Notes:

(1) Popli, Nik (2026): As Trump Brands Them ‘Godless Communists,’ Democrats Divided on How to Respond. Time 07/13/2026. <https://time.com/article/2026/07/13/as-trump-brands-them-godless-communists-democrats-divided-on-how-to-respond/> (Accessed : 2026-13-07).

(2) Michael Harrington, a founder member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and for a long time its most famous member, described Bismarck’s approach to governance as “authoritarian modernization.” Socialism: Past and Future (1989), 45. New York: Arcade Publishing.

(3) Lakoff, George (2023): Time to Get Woke About Woke. FrameLab 03/16/2023. And Lakoff and Gil Duran, Redpilled, QAnon, Anti-Vaccine: Conservative versions of 'woke'. 03/20/2023. Available at the Internet Archive.

(4) Iber, Patrick (2026): Which Way, Western Marxism? (Review). Dissent 73:2, 101-108. <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990886>

(5) Glueck, Katie (2026): Can These Democrats Make Combative Centrism Happen? [Note: Third Way is only “combative” against Democrats who sound like they are to the left of Donald Trump. New York Times 03/02/2026. Gift link: <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/us/politics/democrats-centrism-2028-election.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xVA.6OJo.M8i0vhfJPCOM&smid=url-share> (Accessed : 2026-13-07).

(6) Judt, Tony (1998): The 'Third Way' Is No Route to Paradise. New York Times 09/27/1998. (Accessed: 2026-13-07).

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).