Donald Trump is a communist.
The president wants the midterms to be a referendum on communism. He should be careful what he wishes for.
Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have decided to make the midterms about preventing communist “radicals” from taking over America. That’s going to backfire spectacularly.
The morning after Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Trump pronounced him a “Communist loser,” and by that evening the president was in Las Vegas declaring communism “the greatest threat” America has ever faced. The GOP’s first general-election ads are wall-to-wall “red menace.” (Never mind that El-Sayed calls himself a capitalist.) The plan for November is to run against Karl Marx and to peg every opponent of Trump as a commie.
But that might not go the way Republicans want. If Americans are looking for a militant radical who wants the government to control the economy, silence dissent, and glorify the supreme leader, they can find one. He currently works out of the Oval Office. If Democrats are smart, this will be their theme in the midterms.
Donald Trump himself is a communist, or at least as close to the rulers of past communist regimes as anyone we’ve ever seen hold power in America. I don’t say that in jest. I say it as a former Republican who spent two-and-a-half years inside Trump’s first administration, watching his rule trend away from democracy and toward something darker yet familiar to any student of history. If you strip away the flag pins and look at how Trump actually governs, you find something closer to a Soviet general secretary than to any American president of either party.
Let’s start with what happened this week. On Tuesday, the White House sent Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook a letter announcing that the president is once again “considering removing” her over mortgage fraud allegations, just weeks after the Supreme Court blocked his first attempt. Everyone watching knows what’s really happening. Trump has said out loud that America “should have the lowest interest rate in the world,” and Cook (who says inflation is too high and rates may need to rise) is standing in his way. He already installed a loyalist as Fed chair, and now he wants to purge the board’s dissenters so that he can effectively control the printing of money.
When a ruler seizes the central bank so he can personally direct the flow of money, it’s what’s known as state control of the economy. Every country that’s handed its leader such power (from Weimar Germany to Venezuela) got pretty much the same result. Hyperinflation and savings accounts worth nothing. The Soviets called it “Gosbank.” If a Democratic president so much as flirted with doing this, I promise you that my former GOP colleagues would be lighting their tighty-whities on fire on the Capitol Lawn and screaming, “Communism!” And rightfully so. The move would be a terrifying subversion of our democracy.
But the Fed is just one front. This administration is Hoovered up $27 billion in shared of thirty private companies, including a large chunk of Intel, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, and various other holdings with almost no public transparency on the process, the purpose, or the ongoing relationship. We’re witnessing the partial nationalization of industry. Then if you add in the tariff regime Trump imposed by decree, the Defense Production Act that he’s using to force companies to make certain products, and the deals dictating what companies may sell and to whom… all of a sudden, you have a president starting to command the means of production.
My fellow conservatives used to warn about the dangers of a “command economy.” They wrote screeds against it; I wrote screeds against it. We elected Tea Party congressmen out of fear of it. Now, MAGA candidates are running as full-fledged champions of it, promising to see Trump’s strongman agenda through. After all, the president is only partway done transforming the U.S. government into his own, personal brand of communism. He needs a compliant Congress to finish the job.
The parallels don’t stop at economics, of course, because Soviet-style rule was never mainly about economics. It was about intimidation and power. On that score, the resemblance is uncanny.
Show trials to deter dissent? Ask James Comey, indicted over a photograph of seashells after the government wiretapped him without a warrant, or the dozens of protesters charged under a Civil War-era conspiracy statute. Loyalty purges? Kash Patel has spent a year and a half cleansing the FBI of agents who ever investigated Trump, while Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon sheds generals who fail the fealty test. National security blacklist? I’ve written about being on that list myself, and it’s starting to make 1950s McCarthyism look quaint. State pressure on the press? Just count the lawsuits against news organizations, the banned outlets, the leak hunts where staffers are forced to surrender their phones, the reporter arrests, or the subpoenas served to journalists. Federal judges have now ruled against this administration on First Amendment grounds in seventy-five separate cases, a number with no precedent in American history (and plenty of precedent elsewhere).
Then, there’s the cult of personality. The U.S. Treasury is minting a $1 coin with Trump’s face on it, despite a federal law that prohibits depicting a living person on U.S. currency, and his signature will appear on all American paper money, a first for any sitting president. His portrait hangs banner-sized from federal buildings. The drug-discount program is called TrumpRx. The investment accounts for children are called Trump Accounts. The ballroom, the monuments, the renamings of federal buildings are all gratuitous proof that the man is stamping his likeness onto the state itself, which is what personalist regimes do when the leader and the government are meant to be understood as the same thing.
Even Trump’s political promises have a “five-year-plan,” communist ring to them. The best healthcare in the world! Higher wages! Lower prices! On day one! Groceries down! Energy down! Cleaner cities with everything gleaming! In gold! Most were pledges no leader in a free economy could actually make, because in a free economy the leader doesn’t control such things. Yet Trump promised them anyway, the way Soviet general secretaries promised record harvests. And like the general secretaries, he’s failed on essentially every count, which is why the propaganda has gone into overtime to convince struggling Americans how wonderful their lives are.
Someone will object that Trump believes none of Karl Marx’s actual communist philosophy. And that’s true, I suppose. He has no ideology beyond himself. But that puts him in familiar company. The communist regimes of the twentieth century all started with do-gooder ideas, and in nearly every case the ideology burned off on first contact with reality. What was left were strongmen who discovered that the only way to force their vision on a people was, well, force. They destroyed the rule of law in the name of the common man, but it was really for their own benefit. All of their subordinates stopped believing in the cause and began believing only in the leader — because loyalty was required.
Does that sound familiar to you?
So when Republicans spend the next three months warning about the radical left remaking America into a communist hellhole, listen to them carefully. Think about what they’re describing… out of control spending… seizure of private industry… destruction of capitalism… weaponized government… forced compliance with the regime’s social agenda… attacks on the courts… suppression of free speech. Every item on that list is happening now, and none of it was done by a democratic socialist from Michigan. After you’re done listening, let those MAGA sycophants know who is actually trying to run a communist country.
In the end, there’s another name for the system Donald Trump is building. We know it isn’t capitalism, which has been fully corrupted under his reign. It certainly isn’t constitutional democracy; he’s spent two years making sure you know that. The truth of what he’s building deserves to scare the American people more than communism ever did, because it isn’t across an ocean threatening to invade. It’s already here, and it answers to one man. Call it what it is: Trumpism.
Once you’ve reminded his enablers that Trump is a communist, don’t just shame them for their willful blindness. Do something about it. Defeat them at the polls.
Your friend, in defiance,
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