Word of the Week: Why Trump Keeps Using the Term ‘Communism’

While commemorating the 250th anniversary of the US over the weekend, President Donald Trump made a speech that echoed a bygone era.

“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” he said at a July 3 semiquincentennial event at Mount Rushmore. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

It was one of 14 “communism” or “communist” mentions in a speech spanning 30 minutes. The next day, at a Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall, the president again devoted considerable time to warning about the specter of “communism,” vowing before a crowd of cheering supporters that “America will never be a communist country.”

Calling his opponents “communists” is shaping up to be Trump’s go-to rhetorical counterattack in the midterm election campaign. As democratic socialist victories in some Democratic congressional and municipal primaries have energized parts of the left — and worried more moderate party leaders — the president and his Republican allies are turning to the age-old tactic of “red-baiting.”

“This is not your granddaddy’s Democrat Party,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a recent Fox News appearance. “These are communists.”

“It’s communism, socialism, those are deviations of Marxism,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News on Sunday. “This is communism, and it has led to the murder of innocent people, tens of millions of them in the 20th century alone. We have to fight this.”

The word “communism,” from the French “communisme,” was first used in English around 1840, eight years before the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their “Communist Manifesto.” Broadly, it describes a political ideology that envisions a stateless, classless, moneyless society and common ownership of property and the means of production.

“Communism” became a pejorative in the American political and industrial realms in the early 20th century. Militant labor movements, incorporating immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, brought Marxist ideas to bear on the frequently violent struggle between owners and workers in the United States. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, US authorities feared a similar revolution stateside, while nativists viewed new immigrants as a threat to national security. The widespread anxiety and paranoia manifested as the first Red Scare, which saw the Palmer raids target suspected radicals, anarchists and foreigners.

Through the decades that followed, as communist revolutions consolidated not into egalitarian utopia but totalitarian repression, the Cold War generation associated communism with the regimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, and with memories of duck-and-cover drills under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union.

Trump is deploying the label “communist” against an ascendent group of Democratic candidates and politicians who only go as far leftward as calling themselves democratic socialists. But when the president warns of “communism,” he isn’t talking about the particulars of the candidates’ political ideologies, says Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.

Rather, Sarat says Trump is using the term as a shorthand for “un-American,” signaling to his base that their way of life is under threat. “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America,” Trump said in his July 3 speech. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

“It’s a kind of broad-brush way of saying, ‘These people are not like us; these people threaten our way of life,’” Sarat adds.

Accusing one’s opponents of communist subversion is a well-worn political strategy in the US.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy became a feared national figure by alleging that communist spies and sympathizers had infiltrated American institutions, jeopardizing people’s reputations and livelihoods and pressing them to testify about their own, or others’, purported or actual leftist affiliations. During the Army–McCarthy hearings, the senator was aided in large part by Roy Cohn, his chief counsel, who would go on to become a young Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor.

Warnings of “pink” sympathies also helped Richard Nixon win a Senate seat in 1950. The “communist” label has also historically been used to discredit civil rights movements: Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was often smeared as a “communist.”

But in 2026, nearly 37 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a new Red Scare really going to get Trump out of his deep political hole? Communism’s pure economic theory is now rarely practiced anywhere — even if ruthless leaders in hybrid capitalist economies like China and Russia have retained the authoritarian iron fists of their predecessors.

While conservatives campaign against greater government intervention in the economy — Trump’s successful demands for US equity stakes in corporations notwithstanding — Democrats like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are more comparable to democratic socialists in Europe, with calls for universal healthcare, more public housing, and an interventionist effort to set prices of transport and food. And as Trump has previously labeled even establishment Democrats such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as “communists,” Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Ashik Siddique says calling DSA candidates “communists” in the current political moment carries even less weight.

“It feels to us like words are kind of losing their meaning, and Trump’s attacks on this front are just really falling flat,” he says.

“Socialism” is no longer a scary word for many Americans. A Fox News poll released in March found support for socialism is growing, with a record 38% saying it would be a good thing for the US to move away from capitalism. In another poll by Gallup, released in September, 66% of Democrats said they viewed socialism more positively than capitalism. Independents, who are important in swing-seat elections, favored capitalism to socialism by 51% to 31%.

And for another, younger generation, even “communism” isn’t so frightening. More than a third of Americans under 30 (38%) say they have a favorable view of communism — near par with the 45% who say they have a favorable view of capitalism, according to a poll by the libertarian Cato Institute. (The same cohort likes socialism even more, with 53% of Gen Z respondents reporting a favorable view.)

For the midterms, though, Trump is likely betting that older voters will be swayed by threats of “communism,” and that they’ll be more likely than younger voters to turn out, says Republican strategist John Feehery: “He wants to get old people to vote.”

Researcher Dalton Bouzek conducted a study of “red-baiting” rhetoric across congressional campaigns in 2020 and found that such language didn’t correlate to whether those candidates won elections — though he said it did result in more online engagement.

“These terms are used because there’s still very little public consensus about what these terms mean,” says Bouzek, an instructor of social media at SUNY Brockport. “And if they can be easily weaponized, if they’re easily recognizable terms that people are already primed to feel one way or the other about, they’re going to use those to their advantage.”

Despite the long history of American politicians red-baiting their opponents, the tactic hasn’t always worked out in candidates’ favor.

When Barry Goldwater accused Lyndon B. Johnson of being soft on communism, it backfired: LBJ released the famous “Daisy” ad, which featured a young girl picking petals in the countdown to a nuclear holocaust. The implication was that a vote for the conservative Republican would lead to a nuclear holocaust.

As Trump levels the words “communism” and “communist” against his opponents with little regard for their meanings, Bouzek wonders whether that might backfire, too — potentially leading young people to associate the words with an anti-Trump ethos.

“I could envision a world in which this backfires on Trump and people become more receptive to the idea of the left,” he says.