“You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
That was the line President Donald Trump chose at Mount Rushmore on July 3, with the granite heads of four earlier presidents over his shoulder and America’s 250th birthday celebrations about to begin. Newsweek reported that he warned of a “resurgence of the communist menace in our land” as part of a speech that was, in practice, a pitch for the November midterms.
The politics came through plainly. According to Newsweek, Trump linked the issue to the election itself and told Republicans they could lose control of Congress if they failed to act. He cast communist ideas as a danger to American culture and to its political institutions, and pressed lawmakers to move on his election-related priorities.
Round two on the National Mall
He did not leave it there. In his July 4 address on the National Mall he returned to the theme with some force. “America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen,” he told the crowd, adding that “communism is a loser, and it always will be.” Newsweek also reported that he called it a threat to be stopped “before it begins” and likened it to “a cancer” that should be “cut out fast.”
Behind the rhetoric sits a plain tactic. Newsweek said Republicans have been trying to hang the communist label on Democratic candidates, above all those backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, at a time when progressive and democratic socialist campaigns have been winning. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are among the best-known names the magazine mentioned.
What the scholars say
Newsweek put the question to academics, who drew a firm line between the two ideologies. Marc J. Selverstone of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center said democratic socialists “embrace a market economy,” even as they want the state to do more on social welfare. Communists, he said, “believe in full state ownership of the means of production, as well as centralized planning.”
Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard College, said Republicans blur the terms because it serves them: it lets them frighten voters, in her words, into “thinking DSA folks want to turn the U.S. into Cuba or North Korea.” She added that the Cold War fear of infiltration had a basis then. Today, she said, there is no significant communist movement in the country.
A DSA spokesperson, asked on Monday, told Newsweek that members use different labels but “are all united under the banner of Democratic Socialism and socialist leaders such as Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Newsweek’s reading is that the fight could run through the whole campaign: Republicans see a line of attack, while Democrats are likely to answer that the other side is inflating ideological differences to rally its base.
