Red Scare Under Stone Presidents: Trump Invents Communist Threat, Yet Senses the Natural Enemy of Capitalism Looming

Donald Trump staged what may have been the purest form of political theater of his second presidential era at Mount Rushmore. Beneath the stone faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, against a backdrop that already suggests the monumentality of the American myth, he turned the commemoration of 250 years of independence into a speech about the enemy. America, in his telling, is the oldest republic, the most successful country in history, the freest people on Earth, a "miracle" under God, and the only civilization that has given the world so much good. In such a mythologized vision, any criticism of the order can easily become sacrilege.

The central part of the speech rested on manufacturing a threat to the present. Trump claimed that the "communist threat" is reemerging in America, including among newcomers who, he said, embrace ideas opposed to the American way of life. He immediately tied that rhetoric to migration, suggesting that communism is entering the United States as a foreign body that can be expelled across the border. It is an old American formula, from the first Red Scares to McCarthy, always useful when class discontent needs to be translated into fear of the outsider.

Perhaps he means China? Although, ironically, when we talk about communism these days, actual communism, China may be the last thing that comes to mind.

In the American case, communism is an old scare tactic with a new dose of Trumpism. But it has not appeared out of nowhere, nor is it entirely disconnected from reality, even if we set aside the fact that "communism," in Trump’s vocabulary and in the broader American one, clearly does not, at least for now, mean revolutionary Marxism.

His remarks come after progressive candidates, including democratic socialists, won Democratic primaries in New York, Colorado, and several other states. And with that, the Republican strategy got itself a new poster.

Debates over food prices, housing, healthcare, energy costs, and fatigue with war are pushed aside by the image of a civilizational clash. A democratic socialist, which in European terms would be something like a somewhat more concrete social democrat, becomes a "communist"; the communist then becomes a criminal; the criminal is an immigrant; and the immigrant becomes proof that America is losing itself.

Behind this attack lies a very concrete calculation. Republicans are heading into the congressional elections burdened by inflation, high fuel prices, and the political cost of the war in the Middle East. Any campaign that stays focused on household budgets, rent, medical bills, and food prices creates space for the question of who profited during the years of crisis and why things are the way they are. That is why Trump is trying to change the subject before it becomes a class issue.

In that atmosphere, the return of McCarthyite rhetoric feels almost predictable. When the existing order is so thoroughly identified with wealth, every demand for redistribution is treated as an attack on the nation itself. Anti-communism functions as a protective wall around privilege, a way of pushing social demands beyond the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Perhaps the most interesting moment in the speech was Trump’s call to abolish the filibuster and immediately pass the SAVE America Act, along with his claim that Republicans would then not lose elections for the next hundred years.

And what exactly is that? In a statement that was perhaps meant to sound like a defense of democracy, a fantasy of permanent power broke through.

Mount Rushmore was the perfect stage. Stone behind the president, a crowd before him, and in the speech God, guns, the Founders, Iran, Venezuela, immigrants, and communists. The entire American mythology compressed into one political logorrhea. The defense of the capitalist order is proclaimed as the defense of 1776. Trump has become such a capitalist caricature that his return to the Red Scare sounds like a confession. In the belly of America’s "golden age", one can hear the fear that those who have been exploited for decades to sustain its false shine might one day start demanding an accounting — or even, as the old, real communists would have put it, instead of settling for crumbs from the table, decide to break into the kitchen!