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President Trump made sure to repeat what has become one of his main attacks on Democrats ahead of the fall midterms before leaving a global summit in Turkey dominated by the Iran ceasefire.
“I want to get the word out because what’s forming is communism,” Trump said following the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.
Presidential speeches delivered abroad often carry as much weight with audiences back home as they do with foreign leaders.
Trump made that clear when he used his news conference to call communism the biggest threat that America has faced since its founding.
“Communism is easy to sell,” Trump added. “I would be the greatest communist in history. I’d be right up there with [former Soviet leader Vladimir] Lenin.”
It’s not a new tactic for this president.
During the last election, when struggling to find a memorable attack line against Kamala Harris, Trump eventually landed on “Comrade Kamala.”
He even shared a fake photo of the then-vice president speaking to a giant crowd bathed in red light and waving communist flags.
At the time, when pressed about the personal attacks, Trump defended the strategy – saying he had to run his campaign his own way.
“I think we’re hitting a nerve,” Trump said. “It’s a different kind of race. 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.”
Politicians have used the term communist as a way to attack political opponents for decades going all the way back to the 1950s.
It was during that period when Trump — who just turned 80 years old – grew up.
“This is in his bones,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and former White House aide to George W. Bush.
Troy said anti-communism was not only a bipartisan issue, it was also the dominant view in America.
“And then you add on top of that that his mentor was Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn was that lawyer, fixer who helped hunt communists under [former Senator Joe] McCarthy,” Troy said. “He worked on the McCarthy staff.”
McCarthy’s harsh tactics, though, caused political blowback.
Now, Trump has ramped up the anti-communism rhetoric after primary wins by democratic socialist candidates in New York and Colorado.
He has also painted it as a threat to religion.
“They will close your churches in this country if they go communist, and they’re trying to,” Trump said at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month. “They will kill your people and that’s what they’re about. They want to end religion.”
Jennifer Stromer-Galley, who studies political messaging at Syracuse University, says Trump is conflating democratic socialists with communism in order to energize his base.
Democratic socialists believe capitalism can stay, but they want the government to do more to help everyday people by providing free healthcare, reducing income inequality and expanding social programs. Communists want to end capitalism and replace it with a system where private property is no longer owned by individuals.
Polls show a drop off of Trump support on key issues – such as immigration – that have motivated voters in the past.
“Part of what Trump is doing is creating a new boogeyman,” she said.
None of this is happening in a vacuum.
Economic concerns, in part caused by the war in Iran, have helped drive support for some candidates who identify as democratic socialists or back a larger government social safety net.
And Trump has sought to recast that debate in ideological and emotional terms.
One question is how much resonance the attack line still has with today’s voters.
Raymond Robertson of Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government & Public Service, says while the anti-communist label still carries weight with older voters, it’s not so much in the mindset of younger Americans.
“I think the younger generations don’t have that context because, mainly, they only really remember the first Trump administration and maybe the Obama administration,” he said. “And they don’t remember the end of the cold war. That is ancient history.”
And Robertson says Trump’s criticism of communist influence on Democrats conflicts with his own administration’s investments in major U.S. industries, such as acquiring a stake in Intel and a quote “golden share” in U.S. Steel.
The White House dismisses those claims calling such comparisons “idiotic” and says Trump’s agenda is focused on quote “revitalizing American industry and reshoring manufacturing here at home.”
