Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of ‘communist menace’

President harks back to red scare of his childhood to attack US left – but will such language resonate beyond Maga base?

Perhaps above all else, Donald Trump is a child of the cold war.

Three months before the US president was born, Winston Churchill delivered a historic speech in Fulton, Missouri, that ushered in a generations-long existential struggle between western capitalism and Soviet communism.

Lamenting the spread of Soviet communism across eastern Europe following the allied victory in the second world war, Churchill – by then no longer British prime minister – warned his audience on 5 March 1946 that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent”.

It was the prelude to a nuclear-armed standoff between Washington and Moscow that triggered a hysteria-driven “red scare” in the US – leading to the execution of convicted spies and exemplified by witch-hunts instigated by the Republican senator Joe McCarthy , who claimed he had obtained lists of communist agents working in the state department and other key areas of American life.

The hunt for communists would have been a ubiquitous theme of Trump’s early childhood.

Strikingly, Roy Cohn – McCarthy’s chief counsel, who had masterminded the federal prosecution of the convicted Soviet spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg , subsequently executed for treason – became Trump’s mentor in later decades, as he rose in the New York real-estate world.

“For many years, communism and communists were the major enemy of the United States,” said Harvey Klehr, an emeritus professor at Emory University and an expert in the US’s history with communism.

“There were obviously times it might have gotten exaggerated or or got out of hand, but there was a darn good reason for people to be alarmed about it.”

Paranoia waned in relative terms after McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954, but only abated after the collapse of eastern European communist regimes in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later.

Now, 37 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war, Trump is reviving it.

In a series of high-profile addresses, Trump has identified an ideology that millions of Americans are too young to recall as the US’s biggest threat.

“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said in a speech at Mount Rushmore on 3 July, on the eve of the US’s 250th birthday.

He vowed to “vanquish communists quickly” and “send them into exile”.

That the topic was no one-off was confirmed by a new 100-page report from the state department published this week, titled Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism.

“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” states the report, claiming that the “highest reaches” of the US government have been “infiltrated”.

“Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The rebirth of anti-communist animus has been fueled by the recent success of Democratic candidates identifying as “democratic socialists” – most notably the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

A succession of leftwing candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have followed Mamdani’s triumph by winning Democratic primaries, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted the veteran New York representative, Adriano Espaillat, in June.

Chevalier has drawn scrutiny over a now deleted Twitter account that praised Marxist ideology and historical communist figures, such as Vladimir Lenin.

Several high-profile Democrats and liberal-leaning figures have ridiculed Trump’s attacks for falsely conflating socialism – a term which can describe democratic governments in several European countries – with Soviet-style communism.

“Not subtle: new party line is to associate Communists with every crime, every offense,” wrote Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism, on X. “Create a sense of Communist threat to justify a rightwing crackdown. Old playbook used with coups and Fascist takeovers.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative for New York and a member of the DSA, called the communist label “very silly”.

“They want to call it communist because they don’t want you to know that Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada – everybody else – has it better than us, and we spend the most money for the worst care in the developed world,” she told reporters .

Cara Tobe, a spokesperson for the DSA – asked whether association’s membership included communists – said: “Our organization’s dues-paying members range in political beliefs, but we are all united under the banner of democratic socialism.

“It’s concerning but not surprising that Donald Trump would like to send his opponents into exile, because it’s increasingly evident our ideas win with the American people: socialism beats fascism.”

Yet some commentators say Trump’s charge is not baseless.

“The communist issue is not entirely a bugaboo,” said Klehr, who said the DSA had a “very significant communist component”.

Formed by Michael Harrington , the leftwing activist and writer, in 1982, the DSA was founded under a constitution that excluded members of “democratic centralists” organizations – code for Soviet-style communist parties founded on Lenin’s model.

Klehr said that provision had been repealed – resulting in an influx of radical new members that he compared to the “entryist” infiltration of Britain’s Labour party by the Trotskyite Militant tendency in the early 1980s, which resulted in the adoption of leftwing policies and led to an overwhelming election defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. The faction was expelled in 1985 by Labour’s then leader, Neil Kinnock.

“The DSA has changed, and a significant number of people who unapologetically call themselves Marxist-Leninists or communists have moved into DSA and attained some significant positions,” said Klehr.

Bill Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former White House domestic policy adviser under Bill Clinton, said: “There are people who’ve been in the DSA for decades and can remember the struggle between the democratic and the undemocratic left, and in particular between communists and socialists, and so they are definite.

“They are responding to the perception that there are various communist or communist-adjacent factions that have joined the DSA, and that they don’t want to be part of that.”

Two recent articles in the Atlantic have highlighted the fierce debate over the credentials of DSA candidates and their potential to be catalysts for an ideological shift within the Democratic party .

However, Galston – a self-proclaimed “red diaper baby” whose whose grandfather stood multiple times as a communist candidate in New York – questioned the ability of Trump’s “communist” tag to resonate beyond his Maga base.

He cited a recent Economist/YouGov poll asking voters how much of a threat communism posed to the US. Some 18% termed it a “major threat” and another 25% a “minor threat”, while 33% said it was “not a threat”.

“Trump is 80 years old, and for him, the epithet ‘communist’ rolls off his lips quite naturally, because it was part of the conflict with internal communism and the Soviet Union as an external communist foe that was part of his formation,” said Galston.

“Older Americans, those who do have a memory of the cold war, are more responsive to this alleged threat than are younger Americans. He’s speaking to a political party that is disproportionately supported by older Americans.

“So one way of looking at this is as part of Trump’s overall strategy of base mobilization. He’s preaching to the choir here and he know intuitively who makes up that choir.”

Galston also attributed the resurgence of fears of communism to an age-old popular American failure to make fine distinctions in political terminology – a confusion Trump’s critics say applies to him.

But Klehr argued that the trend signaled a broader threat to democracy and liberal values that he said emanated from the extreme left and far right.

“Donald Trump wouldn’t know a communist from a democratic socialist from a Martian, but there are other very smart people that do understand the difference, and the significance,” he said.

“It’s the same sort of thing that occurred on the political right not that many years ago, when various kinds of rightwing lunatics, neo-Nazis and racists began to move into the Republican party, they won some primaries, they established a beachhead and they’re still there.

“I think some of that is happening in the Democratic party, and it’s dangerous on both counts. It raises serious concerns for the health of a democratic society.

“The memory of communism is fading, and yet … some of the things they call for, it’s like they’ve forgotten the history.”