Desperate Trumpists Try to Stir Up a Panic Over ‘Communists’

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump says communism is on the march again. Addressing a conservative Christian conference on June 26, he accused the Democrats of “becoming a Communist party,” adding that “communism is very easy to sell, it destroys everything, but it is very easy.” Three days later, speaking in the Oval Office, he referred to communism as the “biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding.” He even brought it up in his Fourth of July speech: “All these talks from the Communists, they haven’t got a chance. Not even a chance. We don’t want Communists in our country. Never worked. And it never will work.”

Trump isn’t alone in claiming to see red. Vice President JD Vance has sounded the alarm on Fox News, which is having a field day with “the new wave of communists rising in Democratic Party.” And House Speaker Mike Johnson has warned about the supposed “Marxists and communists” openly running for Congress all over the United States.

But is there really a red wave on Team Blue, or are Republicans engaging in “zombie McCarthyism,” in historian Jeff Bloodworth’s pithy phrase, trying to resurrect communism so their fractious followers can unite against a common foe for the midterms? So far, more the latter than the former. The alleged Communist takeover in the Democratic party amounts to a handful of primary wins by democratic socialists in congressional races (mostly in strong progressive districts) and socialist candidates making headway in a couple of big mayoral races. These candidates, moreover, are not all cut from the same cloth. Some are genuine radicals, like Darializa Avila Chevalier, a congressional candidate from New York City who only a few years ago praised communism and advocated police abolition. But another up-and-coming socialist is Los Angeles councilwoman and mayoral challenger Nithya Raman, a proponent of economic growth who wants to cut red tape for developers to encourage housing construction and has reversed her earlier “defund the police” stance. While Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the group has refused to endorse her.

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Of course, the right’s hand-wringing about far-left insurgents among Democrats is grotesquely hypocritical given the far-right extremism currently normalized in the GOP. In his recent lengthy interview with the Ezra Klein in the New York Times, Republican activist Chris Rufo claimed with a straight face that the “institutional right” has done a far better job than the left of “gatekeeping” the “bad psychological and political tendencies” in its ranks. Oh yeah? The Department of Homeland Security is pretty institutional, and its official account on X has shared fantasies about a paradisiacal America “after 100 million deportations.” Meanwhile, the openly racist, genuinely un-American mantra “when you import the Third World, you become the Third World” is being recited not only by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller but by President Trump himself.

Moreover, the attacks on alleged “Communists” often target bogeymen. Witness the freakout over New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Fourth of July speech, according to much of the right, a hate-America rant that the mayor delivered with a “scowl” while “surrounded by hijabs.”1 Yeesh, get a grip. Were there things to criticize about the speech? Sure: It arguably leaned far too much into class warfare with its simplistic dichotomy of the “bad” America of corporate landlords and insurance companies versus the “good” America of struggling workers. But anti-American? Hardly: Mamdani had enthusiastic words for the opportunities America had afforded immigrants even in times when discrimination was rampant, and for the American Founding itself. If you think there’s something subversive in Mamdani’s statement that America is always striving to better itself and to fully realize “the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence,” then your definition of anti-Americanism probably includes most Americans: In a recent YouGov/CBS News poll of American adults, only 30 percent of respondents said that America had achieved “a great deal” of “the ideals it was founded on.”

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AND YET DISMISSING CONCERNS about the rise of the far left, or sweeping those concerns under the rug for the sake of a “big tent” opposed to Donald Trump, is ultimately shortsighted. Jonathan Chait argues that militants in the DSA, which he believes has departed substantially from the liberal legacy of its founder Michael Harrington, see the Democratic party primarily as a vehicle to exploit to advance their own ideology. They also have little compunction about ferociously attacking mainstream Democrats while expecting big-tent mainstream deference toward progressives. Are they reliable allies? Chait puts it starkly:

The Democratic Party is waging an existential struggle to save democracy, the rule of law, and liberal norms. The DSA’s vanguard does not merely believe that its defense has faltered. It holds those values themselves in contempt as resistance-wine-mom frivolity.

Some of the DSA-affiliated candidates would expand the government’s powers at the very moment when an authoritarian president and his team of zealots and sycophants are already doing their best to pull off a massive power grab. Claire Valdez, one of the socialist House candidates in New York City, has declared that “we need to, like, nationalize the airline industry”, this, at a time when the Trump administration has floated the idea of blocking international flights to cities and states with sanctuary policies for illegal immigrants. (As Cato Institute immigration studies director David Bier pointed out in a tweet: “If we nationalize industries, it means putting Donald Trump in charge of those industries. All the flights would be used for deportation, and they wouldn’t fly to Democrats’ states.”)

The leftists are also likely to be unreliable on some issues that must be key to any meaningful anti-Trump coalition, such as blocking a U.S. withdrawal from NATO, a move that the DSA supports. DSA also opposes military aid to Ukraine; while its statement in February 2022 condemned the Russian invasion, it also channeled the pro-Kremlin line blaming NATO’s “imperialist expansionism.” While most of the left-wing candidates in the current races have not commented on the subject, Chevalier echoed this view when, the day after the invasion, she replied to a post on X questioning our involvement in the conflict with an alarming post of her own: “Cause the Cold War ended and we’ve been bullying Russia ever since. Also war is lucrative for these sociopaths.” When questioned about it recently, she responded only that she wasn’t sure about the “context” of her four-year-old post.

Are stances like these tantamount to communism? Certainly not always. But Chait makes a strong case that the DSA in its current form has been transformed by an influx of Communist activists. (A 2024 post on the site of the Red Star Caucus, one of the Communist caucuses within the DSA, gloats that while the organization used to be anti-Communist and social democratic, “in 2016, a massive wave of new members completely overran its existing membership, and DSA was unable to draw them into its existing ideology.”) Last year, the DSA even repealed a bylaw that had banned people belonging to actual Marxist-Leninist organizations from membership in the DSA. And it’s worth noting that Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, one of the major influencers fueling the left-wing surge, is a vocal admirer of mass-murdering Communist revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong and has lamented the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War.

There’s also the DSA-affiliated Democrats’ baggage of social-issues radicalism, such as support for defunding or even abolishing the police. In her posts in 2020, Chevalier insisted that policing had to be not only reformed but abolished, “full stop”, “No more police at all ever.” Today she at least concedes that the goal is not to “get rid of police overnight” but to create social programs that she apparently believes will eliminate crime.2

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CAN CANDIDATES WITH a record of holding such left-wing views do well outside Democratic primaries in deep blue territory? We’ll see. An interesting case study is in Michigan, where physician Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive, has been leading moderate Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary for the state’s open Senate seat. The polls may shift now that the third major candidate in the race has dropped out. El-Sayed is currently facing an embarrassing flap over newly surfaced 2020 interviews refuting his claims that he has “never, ever” supported the Defund the Police movement.

Also of concern: Some DSA-affiliated candidates have made statements that go beyond harsh criticism of Israel and veer into the realm of antisemitism. In a recent video castigating those supposedly trying to “rig our democracy” to nominate an establishment candidate, El-Sayed singled out Jewish adversaries: AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. In Colorado, attorney Melat Kiros, who recently defeated veteran congresswoman Diana DeGette in a primary, has refused to characterize as antisemitic a 2025 firebombing attack on a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, in which one person was killed and nearly a dozen injured.

All this is bad news, for several reasons. It makes American politics more toxic overall (especially considering that there’s a much larger crop of far-left, DSA-affiliated candidates running in state and local races). It also alienates mainstream voters and thus plays into the hands of the MAGA Republicans. It’s up to the Democrats, at this point, to repair the guardrails against extremism that Trump and his right-wing radicals broke down.

Writing in Compact, Geoff Shullenberger recently compared the rise of anti-establishment left-wing candidates in the Democratic party to the earlier surge of right-wing populism in the GOP, which ultimately led to the Trump presidency and then to its ghastly second iteration. Shullenberger thinks we are witnessing “the Trumpification of the Democrats”, which, he predicts, will take about ten years to come to full fruition. He thinks that’s a good thing, if only as a sign that “democracy lives.” Yet in reality, the far left, like the MAGA right, represents an activist base that can hijack the political process because it’s passionately committed to an ideology in a way moderates cannot match.

At least for now, the two certainly shouldn’t be equated. Far-left Democrats are still very far from dominating their party let alone taking over the country, and moderate candidates, such as Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and Senate candidate Mary Peltola in Alaska, are performing very well in this midterm election year. And the Democratic party’s tolerance for toxic views and toxic behavior in politicians does not remotely compare to the Republican party’s cult of Trump (not to mention its vast gallery of elected and appointed officials with ugly views and ugly character flaws).

Yet even the first steps on the road to Trumpification should be avoided: The further you go down that road, the harder it is to reverse.

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1Two of the ten newly naturalized Americans flanking Mamdani were women in headscarves.

2Chevalier’s social media history also includes posts that reflect a rather toxic brand of progressive identity politics, for instance, a 2019 tweet that appears to attack black and Arab men with white female partners, accusing them of “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.” Chevalier recently told the New York Times that she is “very sad” about some of her old posts which “really sowed some division.”