When Donald Trump gets into a loop, it’s hard to get him out. He’ll just talk in a circle until he’s bored and moves on to the next thing. He has fixated on Greenland and ruminated on his reflecting pool. Right now, though, his focus is The Communists. And as a new Reuters analysis reveals, he’s really into it: Over the past two weeks, Trump has brought up communism a full 81 times.
Communism is an old rhetorical obsession for Trump—who was in first grade when Joseph Stalin died—and his allies. In 2025, he introduced a “National Anti-Communism Week.” He blamed communists for his 2023 criminal indictments. During his 2020 campaign, he accused his opponents of (you guessed it) communism.
It may be a product of his deep relationship with Roy Cohn, a lackey of Red Scare architect Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Trump’s longtime mentor and personal lawyer.
But over the past week, the president appears to have hit overdrive, sermonizing against communism at fever pitch. And like his Red Scare predecessors, Trump is also using the label to go after immigrants, decrying a “resurgent communist menace” from “newcomers to our country” in a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore—designed by an anti-immigrant crusader and Ku Klux Klan associate—that also characterized communism as “a mortal threat to American liberty” and “the greatest threat” to the United States, surpassing Pearl Harbor, both World Wars, the September 11 attacks, et cetera.
Then Trump really got going: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he continued. “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. The godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions…They don’t want good. They don’t love God, and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion, and they don’t want religion, and they won’t have it, but we will not let them win.”
The actual communists of the Communist Party USA have spent the past week sending strident press releases to clarify that they are not, in fact, the Democratic Socialists of America.
Maybe Trump’s handwringing over so-called communists isn’t entirely misguided. After all, capitalism hasn’t been looking too good lately. A recent Gallup poll showed that less than half of young Americans feel positively toward our economic system. The libertarian Cato Institute found last week that a majority of Americans under 30 feel positively about socialism, and more than a third report a favorable view of communism. So if communism is a “cancer” that Trump must “cut out fast,” as he threatened to do at an America250 event, he certainly has his work cut out for him.