For years, President Donald Trump blamed "communists" for his legal and political troubles. Now, the second Trump administration deploys that same historically loaded label to cast his opponents 鈥 from judges to educators 鈥 as threats to American identity, culture and values.
Trump himself explained the strategy last year when he described how he planned to defeat his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, in the election.
"All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country," he told reporters at his New Jersey golf club in August.
Trump did just that 鈥 branding Harris "comrade Kamala" 鈥 and won in November. With the assent of more than 77 million Americans who cast ballots 鈥 49.9% of the vote 鈥 Trump carried that strategy into his second term.
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Not actually communism
President Donald Trump gives a commencement address May 1 at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
Communism still wields big influence in some countries including China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba, but not the United States.
"The core of communism is the belief that governments can do better than markets in providing goods and services. There are very, very few people in the West who seriously believe that," said Raymond Robertson of the Texas A&M University Bush School of Government & Public Service. "Unless they are arguing that the government should run U.S. Steel and Tesla, they are simply not communists."
Still, the word communist can carry great emotional power as a rhetorical tool. It's all the more potent as a pejorative 鈥 though frequently inaccurate, even dangerous, amid the flash of social media and misinformation. After all, the fear and paranoia of the聽20th century are fading into the past.
Trump, 78, remembers.
"We cannot allow a handful of communist radical-left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws," he said in Michigan while celebrating his first 100 days in office.
The White House did not reply to a request for what Trump means when he calls someone a communist.
Timing worth note
Trump's Michigan speech came after the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs published a poll showing more Americans disagree with Trump's priorities so far than agree with them, and many Republicans are ambivalent about his choices of focus. After the speech, the government reported that the economy shrank during the first quarter of 2025 as Trump's tariffs disrupted business.
Two days later, senior presidential aide Stephen Miller stepped to the White House podium to denounce past policies on transgender, diversity and immigration issues. "These are a few of the areas in which President Trump has fought the cancerous, communist woke culture that was destroying this country," he told reporters.
His words offered a selection of clickbait for social media users, as well as terms that could catch the attention of older Americans. Voters over age 45 narrowly voted for Trump over his Democratic rivals in 2020 and 2024.
Smack in the middle of Miller's sentence: communist.
"It tends to be a term that is loaded with negative affect, particularly for older Americans who grew up during the Cold War," said Jacob Neiheisel, a political communications expert at the University at Buffalo. "Appending emotionally laden terms to political adversaries is a way to minimize their legitimacy in the eyes of the public and paint them in a negative light."
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., starts a dispute May 24, 1954, at the reopening of the McCarthy-Army hearing. Roy Cohn sits beside him at left.
Red Scare influence
The Russian Revolution in 1917, which led to the rise of the Soviet Union, and a wave of immigrants led to the Red Scare聽鈥 a period of intense paranoia about the potential for a communist-led revolution in America.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, conducted televised hearings in the 1950s that drove anti-communist fears to new heights with threats, innuendos and untruths.
The hunt for supposed communists during the Cold War after World War II was dubbed McCarthyism. Even suggesting someone was "soft" on communism could end careers and ruin lives. "Blacklists" of suspected communists proliferated before McCarthy fell into disgrace and died in 1957.
The senator's chief counsel during the hearings, Roy Cohn, became Trump's mentor and fixer as Trump rose as a real estate mogul in New York.
Communism started to collapse in 1989 with the Soviet Union.
The modern debate, Robertson says, is not between capitalism and communism, but about how much the government needs to step in and when.
"Calling people who advocate for slightly more government involvement 'communists' is typical misleading political rhetoric that, unfortunately, works really well with busy voters who do not have a lot of time to think about technical definitions and economic paradigms," he said in an email. "It is also really helpful (to Trump) because it is inflammatory, making people angry, which can be addictive."
