Trump says communism threatens America. He and his corporate cronies would know

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller say they’re coming for the “communists” in America, and they need the military on the streets of our cities to do it. Here’s what they’ve said recently on the topic:

Trump

• “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” (Rally)
• “The communists attempting to destroy the American human spirit will fail in their dirty deeds.” (Threatening to use National Guard)
• “It is the enemy from within, and they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick.” (Fox “News” appearance)
• “If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me. They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates.” (Miami speech)

Stephen 'Pee Wee German' Miller:

• “We are not going to let the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital. Most of the citizens who live in Washington, DC, are Black.” (Speech to troops in DC)
• “President Trump will make this nation safer than ever before, and he’ll do it over the fighting and opposition of the Democrat party, over the fighting and opposition of the communist left-wing judges.” (Fox “News” appearance)

Trump even included “anti-capitalism” as one of the “indica” (indicators) of “potential terror activities” that should cause the 200-plus Joint Terrorism Task Forces — set up in every major American city between local police, state police, and the FBI — to begin tapping your phone, reading your email, and surveilling your activities if they determine you’re an “anti-capitalist.”

So, what the hell are these guys talking about? What do Americans think of all this rhetoric, and what does that tell us about the future of the GOP and the Democratic Party? And the American middle class, for that matter?

After all, capitalism can’t exist without a little bit of socialism, and a middle class can’t exist in a meaningful way without a lot of socialism, as the New Deal and Great Society proved. But only Donald Trump is actually pursuing communism (more on that in a moment).

Gallup recently released a new poll showing that Americans’ support for capitalism has crashed from 60 percent as recently as 2021 to a mere 54 percent this year, the lowest recorded level in the history of their tracking. Big business is also sharply less popular: only 37 percent rate it favorably, the lowest since Gallup started asking.

For the first time, Democrats favor socialism over capitalism (66 percent vs. 42 percent), highlighting a dramatic shift and partisan gap. Republicans, on the other hand, are 74 percent to 14 percent in favor of capitalism over socialism.

Capitalism, simply, is a system that allows people with money (capital) to invest that money in ways that produce more money for them. The two most common ways that happens is by starting a business or buying stock in an existing company.

Most Americans will tell you they’re capitalists, but they’re not; real capitalists make the majority of their money not by working with their minds or hands in an office or factory but, instead, by putting their money (capital) to work via investment vehicles.

But capitalism — as Adam Smith pointed out back in the 18th century in Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments — can’t exist without a “socialist” government providing guardrails, incentives, and systems for keeping people honest.

From laws against fraud and stock manipulation, to courts and jails to enforce those laws, to public roads and airways to facilitate commerce, a little bit of socialism (government using some of the money produced by capitalism and extracted from it by taxes) is necessary for capitalism to exist.

In fact, Americans have vigorously embraced socialism ever since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s woke us all up to the dangers of raw, unregulated capitalism. We have literally hundreds of socialist institutions all across our various government agencies that not only support capitalism but also built the nation’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class in the middle of the 20th century.

From fire departments to banking and insurance regulators to programs like Social Security and Medicare, socialism has built a massive edifice of American prosperity over the past century. Here’s a list of the top 50 socialist programs or agencies:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Unemployment Insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Women Infants and Children (WIC), Housing and Urban Development, Earned Income Tax Credit, Public Schools, State Universities, Community Colleges, Minimum Wage Laws, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Public Health Departments, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Public Libraries, Fire Departments, Police Departments, Public Water Utilities, Public Sewer Systems, U.S. Postal Service, Public Transportation, Veterans Health Administration, Head Start, Federal Student Aid, Public Housing Authorities, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Aging, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, State-Produced Insulin Initiatives, State Disability Insurance Programs, Small Business Administration, National Science Foundation, AmeriCorps, U.S. Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Affordable Care Act Exchanges, Child Care & Development Block Grant, Green Energy Subsidies, National Endowment for the Arts, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, National Park Service, Community Health Centers.

Rightwing billionaires — who are true capitalists, since they make most of their money with their money — hate the fact that these programs mostly help average working people and smaller businesses, and the rest of us want billionaires to pay their damn income taxes to help fund them.

So, they finance and elevate politicians and ideologues who use their positions and power to try to gut these agencies, while supporting think tanks and media stars who trash-talk socialism and deify capitalism to keep billionaire taxes low.

The most obvious recent examples are Elon Musk and Russell Vought taking chainsaws to the federal government, and red state governors who keep their people in poverty by gutting social programs along with holding down taxes on their richest citizens.

The simple reality, first identified by Adam Smith in 1776, amplified by David Ricardo in the early 19th century, and now understood by most economists, is that without these “socialist” programs, predominantly capitalist societies will revert to their natural state: a tiny 1 percent of the morbidly rich; a sliver of around 5 percent of a middle class made of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who serve the rich; and a groaning, toiling 94 percent of the working poor who provide the labor to make the rich even richer.

Read any book by Charles Dickens and you’ll get the picture; his father was dragged off to debtors’ prison and most of his books accurately depict how capitalism ravaged working class people for a thousand years leading up to and including the Victorian era.

In A Christmas Carol, in fact, the morbidly rich don’t even make an appearance; Scrooge was that era’s middle class, owning a small (one employee plus himself) business, and Bob Cratchit was the working poor who couldn’t even afford healthcare for his disabled son.

This is the world that Trump, Vance, Musk, Vought, and their GOP lackeys want to take us back to: they’re committed to undoing virtually every one of the agencies and programs listed above, along with at least a hundred others.

At the same time, the Overton window for how much socialism Americans want has been steadily shifting to the left.

The majority of Americans today want what other “socialist” developed countries (like most of free Europe, Asia, and Costa Rica) have: free or cheap healthcare and college, top-flight public schools, an end to widespread homelessness, action against climate change and toward green energy independence, and higher taxes on billionaires to pay for it.

Which finally brings us to the real outliers: the communists.

Communism is generally defined as an economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are collectively owned — typically by the state — rather than by individuals or corporations. The government, in other words, owns the companies that generate wealth, create goods and services, and employs the people.

Which, weirdly, is where Trump is taking us as he demonstrates his total lack of economic understanding. He’s now had the federal government buy or otherwise acquire stock in multiple companies, including Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and the US Steel Corporation.

As a recent contrarian article in Current Affairs points out:

“Since the Intel deal was announced on August 22, making the U.S. government a significant stakeholder in the tech company, there’s been a slew of news articles and op-eds solemnly warning about the rise of an orange-hued Trumpian communism. Variations on this theme have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times (twice!), the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, Axios, Yale Insights, the Atlantic, the Free Press, Reason, and even regional newspapers like Indiana’s Indy Star.”

While Trump is shifting our political system toward the single-party strongman authoritarianism (sometimes called fascism) of his heroes who run Russia and Hungary, he’s pushing our economy in the direction of communist countries like Cuba, Vietnam, and China.

Which just makes sense. Because pure communism only works in small societies like Jesus and his disciples (with “a common purse”) or ancient tribal societies, when it’s tempered with a bit of capitalism the strongman types who run those “communist” countries get to skim massive wealth off the top of the businesses they allow to function.

This is today’s Trump-grift 101, whether it’s his brand-new $5 billion crypto fortune (with government support) or his recent real estate deals around the world cut based on his power in DC.

Republicans are racing toward a billionaire-friendly, every-man-for-himself version of capitalism, while Trump pushes a strongman, one-party communist model of top-down control of the economy (tariffs by fiat, politicize the Fed, have government own companies) that puts political power over markets.

Democrats, by contrast, are trying to restore the healthy mix that once worked here: private enterprise policed by real rules, paired with public investments that serve the common good, the balance that built the mid-century American middle class before Reagan took an ax to it by destroying “socialist” high taxes on rich people and gutting “socialist” labor unions.

Whether America can put its middle class back together will depend on how simply and forcefully Democrats can explain it in the face of Trump’s and Miller’s “communist Democrats” scare talk.

The stakes are enormous. In 1981, roughly 65 percent of households could live solidly in the middle class on a single paycheck. Today, after the Reagan-era shift to “reject socialism” and cut taxes on the morbidly rich, only about 47 percent manage that even with two incomes. Rebuilding a broad middle class is not nostalgia; it’s the foundation of a functioning democracy.

Reviving the once-great American middle class is vital for democracy to thrive, and only progressives within the Democratic Party are working for the modest amount of government socialism that history proves will produce that outcome.

If they fail and Trump and his Republicans succeed in making the entire American economy subservient to this country’s billionaires, we’ll all become Bob Cratchits and our children will all become tiny Tims.