Trump’s New Ridiculous and Dangerous Red-baiting

President Donald Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller at a press conference during the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on July 8. Klaudia Radecka/AP A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. History repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” So wrote Karl Marx, the OG of communism, in 1852. And this oft-cited observation applies to the latest nonsense from Donald Trump and his cult: the New Red Scare. Trump and his MAGA zombies have been on a tear in recent weeks, asserting that the United States faces tremendous peril from communism and is a hair’s breadth away from eradication due to the pinkos’ diabolical plotting. At a campaign-like rally in Marietta, Georgia, on Wednesday, the Mad King laid it on thick: The radical left is actively trying to destroy our children’s future with the disaster known as communism. It’s communism… These are communists… The communists want to take [Mount Rushmore] down… They want to blow it up. They want to take it down…Communism is in my opinion, communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history including even World War I and World War II, 9/11, and Pearl Harbor. Trump: The radical left is actively trying to destroy our children's future with the disaster known as communism. The communists want to take Mount Rushmore down. They want to blow it up and take it down. pic.twitter.com/p0NLU3TyP0— Acyn (@Acyn) July 22, 2026 This is bunk. There’s no communist organization in the United States with any massive following or membership. (Estimates for the Communist Party-USA range from a few thousand to the 15,000 the group itself has claimed.) As for other far-left outfits, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has identified as communist, the numbers are likely much lower. Of course, Trump and his minions are not really talking about communism. They are engaged in a cynical con job, deliberately mislabeling all leftism, such as the politics of Democratic Socialists of America and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as “communist.” Pointing to the electoral wins of Mamdani and other DSAers, they are trying to generate hysteria about communism taking hold—equating socialism with communism and perpetuating a lie. (With his endeavors to force major corporations to hand the US government large ownership interests, Trump himself is striking a socialist stance.) While Trump has long decried Democrats and liberals as “lunatics” in league with radical commies and antifa, the GOP has truly swung behind this idiotic red-baiting as the midterm elections approach. The red-under-your-bed fearmongering is intensifying. Last week, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority leader, declared, “The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November.” No, it isn’t. But the Trump White House and GOP have issued their talking points. They have nothing to boast of, as the Iran War turns into a pointless quagmire that raises the price of gasoline, and little, if anything, is done to address the affordability issues many Americans face. So it’s back to the future with commie-scaring. The absurdity of this crusade is no impediment for Trumpers and Republicans. When Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) was asked on Fox News about Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) calling for an end to Trump’s war in Iran, he said Democrats were infected by “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “an anti-American point of view” characterized by a “hammer and sickle wave.” Was Schmitt really calling Warner, a centrist Democrat who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the telecommunications business before entering politics, a commie? Kind of, no matter how ludicrous that was. This red-baiting is what policy wonks might call a whole-of-government project. A week ago, the State Department released a ridiculous 100-page report that claimed the communist government of Cuba has mounted a “campaign of subversion” that has penetrated “the highest reaches of the US government” and shaped “generations” of American leftists, including Mamdani, the DSA, and other left-leaning groups and activists. It used to be that the Soviets were the Red Menace subverting the United States through their lefty puppets here. Now it’s Havana. The report devotes much of its breathless exposition to ties between Cuba and far-left American activists in the 1960s and 1970s—say, the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground—connections that have nothing to do with current US politics. The Trump crew’s demagoguery extends beyond branding Democrats commies to associating modern-day progressives and Democrats with political violence. Using the present tense, the State Department report asserts the Cuban operation “is a campaign” that “has backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism on American soil.” And top Trump White House aides, including the noxious Stephen Miller and the equally noxious Seb Gorka, have been decrying what they call “left-wing violence” in the United States as “political terrorism”—and insisting it is a major threat to national security. (Narrator: It isn’t.) At a recent conference on “left-wing terrorism” at the State Department, Miller brayed that from-the-left violence imperils “the survival of our republican form of government.” But he did something even more odious than hurl this bogus charge. He said: One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pre-textual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist—who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice—protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him. We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. .@StephenM: One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism its completely pre-textual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the Left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal… https://t.co/x5UHiZnkya pic.twitter.com/zO0XQoeSSg— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 16, 2026 See what Miller is trying to pull off here? As he and his comrades scheme to tar all leftists as commies and violent radicals, he’s laying the groundwork for dismissing any civil liberty concerns this nefarious endeavor might prompt. When we go after those lefty evildoers, he’s warning, they will claim their rights are being trampled, but don’t buy it. Accepting that argument, he huffs, will be the death of America. Miller is establishing a predicate for violating the civil rights of Americans deemed enemies by Trumpistan. This is nothing new—just a major extension of the Trump administration’s despicable attempt to justify the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by tarring them as domestic terrorists and criminals. By the way, Miller could not help but be his nasty self. He observed, “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations…to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.” I will resist making the obvious point. The Trump gang is bent on intertwining the idea that Democrats are commies with the notion that the left is a cesspool of violence. On the same day that Schmitt suggested Democrats are all communists, he appeared on the podcast of Benny Johnson and agreed with this MAGA influencer who claimed the left is preparing “a mass slaughter event.” (Remember, Johnson was one of the pro-Trump commentators who were paid millions in secret funds from Russia.) Let’s go back to Comrade Marx and his view of history. At the end of World War II, the Republican Party was in a jam. It had been in charge during the years that led to the Great Depression, and many of its leaders had opposed US involvement in the war until Pearl Harbor. Those were two big oops. But the party after the war got its mojo back in part by assailing Democrats and liberals as communists, an effort led by a newbie congressman named Richard Nixon. This crusade blossomed into the Red Scare of the 1950s led by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.), an unprincipled but effective alcoholic scoundrel. Eventually, McCarthy’s fear campaign burnt itself out. But the presidential administrations of Nixon and Ronald Reagan each tried to reignite the red-baiting. The Reagan team went to great lengths to taint liberals and Democrats—such as the nuclear weapons freeze movement—as commie dupes and fronts for the Soviets. The Cold War was raging, and these allegations still packed a punch. Now we’re in farce territory. The Soviet threat is gone, replaced by different dangers posed by Vladimir Putin’s regime, and it’s Trump and his loyalists who have become Moscow’s useful idiots (as I detail in my forthcoming book How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America). Yet Trump and his authoritarian automatons are whipping up fears about internal subversion and communism. And they’re linking this to Cuba, a nation that appears to be slowly collapsing. Under pressure from the United States and without oil from Venezuela, Cuba is seeing its power grid and food production systems failing. As Trump’s approval rating plummets, Miller and his fellow plotters are trying extra hard to turn antifa and homegrown radicals into an existential threat to the United States—and to lump Democrats and all progressives into the mix. It would be laughable—yeah, Mark Warner and antifa together working to destroy America—but this gang of authoritarians seems prepared to abuse their government power to target their political enemies and to goose-step over civil liberty protections that safeguard political speech and action. Marx’s point about a historical rerun being farcical has a poetic ring. But it leaves out an important truth: A farce can still be extremely dangerous. To preorder a signed copy of How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, click here.