Republicans hope they’ve found a vulnerability in the Democratic Party after three progressive candidates endorsed by Democratic Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defeated establishment-backed Democrats in June 23 Democratic primaries. The Greedy Oligarchs’ Party returned to the well-worn attack of calling progressive Democrats communists.
Donald Trump on “Truth Social” insisted “Many Communists running in badly failing Blue States” and that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
But none of the Mamdani-backed candidates were running as communists. Each of them campaigned on popular issues, such as providing Medicare for All, providing affordable housing, stronger union protections, restoring safety nets for the working poor and stopping Trump’s abusive anti-immigrant regime.
“The attack was boringly familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to U.S. politics for the last 60-plus years,” Oliver Willis noted at DailyKos.com. “Conveniently for the right, whoever is in charge of the Democratic Party or is an influential voice within the party is one of the Four Horsemen of communism or socialism.”
Days after the New York primaries, more than a dozen centrist Democrats signed an open letter declaring “we are capitalist, not socialist,” in an attempt to distance themselves from insurgent progressives.
A week later, Republicans saw red in Colorado when Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old Democratic Socialist and first-time candidate, defeated 15-term incumbent Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette on June 30 in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District primary,
Trump spent his address July 3 at Mount Rushmore, S.D., the night before the nation’s 250th birthday, raising the Red Scare, shouting about the “communist menace” and suggesting that his Republican Party should take control of elections from the states and implement voter suppression rules that will let Republicans govern the nation for a century.
Before arguing for 100 years of Republican rule, Trump continued the exaggerated anti-communist rhetoric he has employed since progressive Democratic-Socialist candidates won a series of Democratic primary victories.
“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,” Trump said from Mount Rushmore. “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”
Trump’s remarks, which he repeated in his July 4 speech on the National Mall, clearly implied a false link between communism and the Democratic Party. It’s hard to distinguish between Trump’s hypocrisy and his increasing dementia. But Trump actually has treated himself to slices of communism, as he has acquired equity stakes for the U.S. government in for-profit companies, breaking with decades of free-market economic orthodoxy.
After the Biden administration in 2024 extended a $2.3 billion loan to Lithium Americas, which was building a lithium mine and processing plant in Nevada, the Trump administration proposed to convert that loan into an equity stake as a way to accelerate the domestic production of critical minerals that are needed for battery production, Reuters reported.
A similar deal was negotiated with U.S. chipmaker Intel, which had received billions of dollars in grants under the Biden administration to build domestic plants but was losing money and struggling to stay competitive. The U.S. government under Trump took an $11 billion stake in Intel, described as a “passive ownership,” which means it agreed to vote with the company’s board, with limited exceptions, the Christian Science Monitor reported.
There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving American companies. In June 2025, the administration approved Nippon Steel’s $14 billion takeover of U.S. Steel in a deal that included a so-called golden share in the Japanese company for the U.S. government. It gave the U.S. government a say, including veto power over critical decisions, in domestic steelmaking. U.S. Steel later reversed a decision to close a struggling mill in Granite City, Illinois, the Monitor noted.
Republicans have claimed that concerns about working-class issues looked like communism ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted his New Deal package of legislation to haul the U.S. out of the Great Depression. Conservative politicians, media magnates and critics routinely denounced his New Deal policies, which sought to regulate the excesses of capitalism to protect farmers, workers and small businesses, as “socialist” or “communist.” Right wingers claimed Roosevelt had allowed radicals to infiltrate his administration.
Later, during the late 1940s and 1950s, despite the economic recovery after World War II, enabled by subsidies for education and training of returning war veterans and establishment of union rights that enabled the growth of a middle class that was the envy of the rest of the world, conservative politicians such as Sen. Joe McCarthy argued that FDR’s administration and his wartime alliance with the Soviet Union proved he harbored communist sympathizers.
Ronald Reagan gained notoriety in the 1960s and ’70s as a critic of “socialist” Medicare for senior citizens and federally subsidized grants and loans that allowed high school graduates from working-class families to go on to college and learn crazy ideas about challenging elected officials about the wars they got us into. Right wingers complained that students could get law degrees without being anchored by debt, which let many go into public-interest law, where they could pursue lawsuits against state and local governments.
Republicans depicted former President Barack Obama as a socialist in moderate clothing. They called Obama’s signature policy, the Affordable Care Act, a government takeover of healthcare—which actually offered a free-market option to expanding Medicare, as subsidies allowed middle-class families to get coverage from private health insurance companies that were subsidized to make them affordable. Then Republicans reduced the subsidies in 2025, leaving an opening for Medicare for All.
We don’t believe Democrats should call themselves socialists, because it lets Republicans put the red target on them. (At least, “socialism” doesn’t appear to scare younger voters.) But “Progressive” is a good label for young and old voters, and we like “New Deal Democrat,” which harkens back to the movement to bring social and economic justice to working people from the 1930s to the 1960s. Democrats should revive the New Deal for the 21st century.—JMC
From the August 2026 issue of The Progressive Populist
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