WASHINGTON – A specter is haunting the country, according to President Donald Trump.
Decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, Trump is warning Americans that communism is rearing its head domestically, citing gains by self-described democratic socialists in Democratic Party strongholds.
“America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen,” Trump said in his Fourth of July speech on the National Mall, in one of the dozens of recent references he has made in recent weeks as he paints Democrats as radical in the run-up to the midterm elections.
“It’s like a cancer. You’ve got to cut it out. … Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen,” he said.
In New York City, two democratic socialists, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, won congressional nominations in the June 23 Democratic primaries, as did candidates for seven downballot offices who were backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
In Colorado, another DSA-backed candidate, Melat Kiros, ousted Rep. Diana DeGette in the June 30 Democratic primary.
Political experts say Trump’s rhetoric may resonate with his supporters but he is stretching the term communist far beyond its true meaning.
“Communism” evokes images of bread lines, gulags and secret police like Stalin-era USSR, Mao-era China or Castro-era Cuba.
But no one in U.S. politics that Trump calls a communist is advocating for Soviet-style authoritarianism, said Lane Kenworthy, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego.
Democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, for instance, “just wants the United States to look more like Denmark in terms of its policies,” Kenworthy said – a system that is “basically capitalist,” combining a free market with expansive social welfare programs.
Europeans call that a social democrat.
In the former Soviet Union, the government owned and ran everything from farms to nuclear plants, and the Communist Party controlled the levers of power.
It’s a repressive ideology that has been in retreat for decades.
“Communism is a scary word for people in this country,” said Ronald Suny, a University of Michigan historian who has written extensively about the USSR, Stalinism and communism. But it’s a far cry from democratic socialism, and Trump “deliberately confuses them or conflates” the terms, he said.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump branded former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, “Comrade Kamala.”
Last Sunday, he reposted a video calling for “hardcore communist bastards” to be deported, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The democratic socialism represented by Mamdani, Sanders, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others is “not a revolutionary” movement, he added. Rather, it supports reform of the capitalist system to strike a different balance between the common good and corporate or individual profit.
Trump’s rhetoric holds echoes of the 1950s, when Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy led a crusade to smoke out communists and their sympathizers from movie lots, universities, federal agencies and private workplaces.
McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, later served as Trump’s mentor and personal lawyer, exposing him to the strategy of portraying opponents as dangerous ideological threats, without regard to evidence.
The Red Scare destroyed careers and the rhetoric remains potent, at least for some voters.
“The left likes to call the right fascists and Nazis,” said Jeremy Friedman, a Harvard professor who specializes in the history of global communism. “The right likes to call its opponents communists, socialist, tied to the Soviet Union. … It’s really about the invocation of this great evil.”
Communist systems have historically been defined by one-party rule and centralized economic planning and ownership.
One of the most common misconceptions, Friedman said, is “that if the state is involved in the economy, that is communism.”
In reality, he noted, governments play some role in every modern economy. That includes the United States.
Under Trump, the federal government has taken equity stakes in more than two dozen companies that provide steel, semiconductors, nuclear energy and strategic minerals – extraordinary policies that seem to conflict with his anti-communist rhetoric.
In social democracies, Friedman said, the private sector dominates the economy but the government redistributes some wealth through taxation to fund services such as healthcare and education.
That is the common modern meaning of socialism, though people mistakenly use that term and communism interchangeably.
Democratic socialists generally seek more government control of the economy, “not just redistribution,” Friedman said, and nowhere near the state control seen under the Soviets.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined the modern concept of communism in 1848. “The Communist Manifesto” they wrote imagined a classless society without private property. There are only five remaining communist countries, each considered repressive: China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam.
The Democratic Socialists of America was founded in 1982 to champion democratic socialism within the Democratic Party. It advocates for free universal healthcare and higher taxes on the wealthy, not for overthrow of capitalism and the market economy.
The group claims 120,000 members nationwide, up from 8,000 a decade ago.
Grace Mausser, co-chair of the New York City chapter of the DSA, said the movement’s commitment to change “through mass movements and the ballot box” differentiates it from communist and socialist movements that conservatives try to tar it with.
The socialism part of democratic socialism is grounded in the belief that the government should use its resources to make life more affordable for “working class Americans” rather than “siding with billionaires and oligarchs,” Mausser said.
There are actual communists in the United States, but not many. And even they prefer the somewhat less pejorative term “socialist” to describe their agenda.
Joe Sims, co-chair of the Communist Party USA, said his party has around 11,000 members nationally, and advocates what it calls a “Bill of Rights socialism” tailored to the U.S. context.“We don’t believe that there are any universal models of socialism,” he said, adding that the party’s vision is “founded on U.S. history, U.S. traditions, U.S. culture.”
The biggest distinction he points to with democratic socialisms is that his party believes capitalism cannot be reformed, only “fundamentally changed,” because it inevitably perpetuates inequality.
The Communist Party USA supports public ownership of mines, factories and major industries – “the main means of production,” Sims said. “Small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and so on, would remain in private hands.”
He foresees a coalition if communists ever come to power. “There would not be, we don’t think, single party rule,” he said.
But that’s a very long way off. Hardly anyone has been elected running openly as a communist in the U.S.
No self-proclaimed communist has won a seat in Congress.
The first and last elected to any state-level office was A.C. Miller, who won a North Dakota House seat in 1924.
Just three communists currently serve in public office, all local posts. All were elected last November: Daniel Carson is a city council member in Bangor, Maine. Luisa de Paula Santos won a seat on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, school committee. Hannah Shvets, a Cornell University student, won a seat on the city council in Ithaca, New York.
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