Trump's red-baiting won't work
He's campaigning on an even dumber version of McCarthyism.
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With the midterm elections approaching, President Trump hit upon a message that could turn a potential blowout for Republicans into an unexpected win. Deploying his two favorite emotions — hate and fear — he used his bully pulpit to flood the media with warnings about a dire threat to all that Americans hold dear.
It was 2018, and the threat was “caravans” of migrants heading through Central America, supposedly on their way to lay waste to our nation and even murder you and your family.
But despite Trump’s unmatched ability to seize public attention, the voters just didn’t buy it, and the sweeping Democratic victory that had been predicted came to pass.
With this year’s midterms just four months away, Trump is trying it again. But instead of migrant caravans, this year’s terrifying menace is … communism!
Given how Trump has moved the word into such heavy rotation, it deserves the exclamation point. In a series of recent speeches, not to mention his off-the-cuff remarks to reporters, Trump has brought up communism dozens of times, in both broad terms (“America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen. Communism is a loser, and it always will be”) and specifically with regard to the opposition.
Democrats, Trump claims, “are turning communist themselves. It’s becoming a communist party. These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists. They’re godless communists.”
Other Republicans are following his lead. According to the Washington Post, mentions of “communism” from prominent conservatives on podcasts and social media are up 43 percent so far this year, and that will only increase as Trump continues his red-baiting.
If the rhetoric sounds outdated, that may be because in Trump’s mind it’s still the 1980s, when the dashing young real estate investor was all over the tabloid gossip pages and Ronald Reagan was taking it to the Russkies. But for most Americans, communism is a story out of history books or a fading memory.
You’d have to be at least 50 to have been aware of communism when the Warsaw Pact still existed — which excludes almost two-thirds of Americans. Of the few remaining communist countries, China is in some ways more capitalist than we are, and no one sees Cuba or North Korea as a threat to take over America.
Three cheers for capitalism?
Nevertheless, Trump always argues that external adversaries pale next to the terrifying threat from within — that is, Americans who don’t support him. Now he’s presenting voters with a syllogism: There is an ascendant wing of populist leftists within the Democratic Party, some of whom call themselves socialist; those Democrats are actually not socialists but communists; therefore all Democrats are communists.
It’s ludicrous, sure — but so are many arguments Trump has made, some of which were persuasive to significant numbers of voters. But refighting the grand battle between communism and capitalism won’t be easy.
First, that particular argument ended decades ago, and capitalism pretty much won. Even the Americans who today call themselves “socialist” or “democratic socialist” are mostly Scandinavian-style social democrats. They aren’t advocating the abolishment of private property and the creation of a Politburo to run the government; what they want is essentially a free enterprise system with more robust regulation and a more comprehensive system of social supports.
More importantly, the argument now is about which version of capitalism we ought to have — and Trump is trying to create what may be the worst possible one.
Look at the list of economic concerns that are putting Americans in such a sour mood. High prices top the list, and though governments of all kinds have struggled to keep inflation in check over the last few years, capitalism doesn’t seem to have an answer.
The cost of health insurance keeps rising — and thanks to budget cuts delivered by Trump and Republicans, millions of Americans can no longer afford coverage.
We have a housing affordability crisis, which is after all just a function of supply and demand. Even Republicans are trying to find a way for the government to step in and use its power to address the failure of the market (Trump called the bipartisan housing bill “a big yawn”).
The idea that the economic system is rigged in favor of powerful interests is so obvious that it’s almost impossible to deny; three-quarters of Americans in a recent CNN poll agreed that it’s rigged. While Trump himself made that argument in 2016, he has done everything he could to rig it even further: cutting taxes for the wealthy, slashing regulations on behalf of corporations, eliminating consumer protections, and targeting every program in sight that offers respite or benefit to those without power, from food stamps to rural development to protection for people with disabilities.
At the same time, Trump has allied himself closely with the increasingly unpopular tech industry and its repellent leaders, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. The ludicrous wealth of these centibillionaires has become a symbol of capitalism’s injustice and tendency toward inequality, while Americans grow livid about rapacious tech companies planning to eliminate their jobs with AI and planting data centers on every available patch of land.
On top of that, Trump has rapidly accelerated almost every aspect of what we might call the Scam Economy. Crypto schemes, ubiquitous gambling, hidden fees for everything, a mountain of social media cons — this administration’s attitude is to let it all bloom (especially if Trump and his family can cash in).
To add insult to injury, he has pardoned a long list of thieves, fraudsters, and inside traders. Why not, when he himself is one of the biggest con artists of them all? His recent financial disclosures revealed that he made $636 million on his $TRUMP meme coin alone — yet the value of the coin collapsed by 97 percent, and nearly a million investors lost their money, totaling billions.
The rampant corruption of the administration sends a clear message: Rules are for suckers, and people with power get to grab whatever they can. At the same time, Trump wants to argue that his version of capitalism has delivered prosperity for all. Which has many voters saying, Really? It can’t get any better than this?
In Trump’s America, “capitalism” doesn’t necessarily mean the glorious promise of the American Dream, which 78 percent of Americans said in a recent poll is harder to attain than in the past. Instead, to many it means big corporations maximizing their profits at the expense of workers and consumers, while they keep a firm grip on government to ensure that their wealth keeps expanding.
Capitalism’s advocates have some work to do, and they’re giving it their best shot. At the University of Iowa, for instance, all students will now be required to take courses offered by the Center for Intellectual Freedom, which was created by the state’s Republican legislature. Among its offerings is a course called “Why Capitalism Rocks!” taught by the CEO of a midwestern hospitality corporation.
“The reason why capitalism generally makes humans better people and why capitalism is more fun will be explored,” the course description reads.
That certainly sounds like the kind of cringy propaganda guaranteed to make young people roll their eyes. But don’t count the capitalists out; they have a long and successful history of convincing ordinary people that taxes should be low, regulation is bad, worker power is dangerous, and businessmen are the most virtuous among us.
That doesn’t mean, however, that braying about communist infiltration will produce Republican wins in the fall. With capitalism failing so many Americans, it’s not enough for Trump to just shout “Commies!” and assume that the votes will follow. Especially when, in all his corruption and greed, he is the living embodiment of capitalism as he wants it to be.
The electorate may not be itching for communism, but the specter of it probably isn’t keeping them up nights either. And a little socialism may not sound so bad.
That’s it for today
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One reason NOT to relax: repetition of bullshit works, and it's proven itself time and again to be especially effective with MAGAs and the MAGA-adjacent. In controlled cog psych studies, the illusory truth effect (BS repetition) works for humans of any stripe – even when the subjects absolutely know the claim is total bullshit. It's just less cognitively demanding to buy bullshit one has heard before. And Trump's a master of the art.
So, is dumb McCarthyism flawed and illogical? Yes. Have I picked my jaw up off the ground thousands of times in the age of Trump, at the sheer stupidity of MAGA gullibility? Also yes.
A quibble: Trump is a con man, not an artist—a bully without charm or wit or manners, certainly not the charisma of that artist.