‘Communist’ can be added to the list of Trump’s verbal salvos against Democrats

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Nuance isn’t a word in Donald Trump’s political playbook. Neither is subtlety. That’s not how he operates. So if someone has offended him — for just about any reason — that person, as far as Trump is concerned, is a loser. Or maybe a low-IQ, horrible individual. Or a pathetic disgrace. Sometimes, he’s even treasonous, a word he recently used to describe David Sanger of the New York Times.

Now we can add “communist” to the list of Trump’s verbal salvos — a word that may come in handy as the midterm elections approach.

According to the Washington Post, “President Donald Trump denounced Democrats as communists after self-described democratic socialists won primaries in New York…, previewing a new emphasis for his campaigning in this year’s midterms.”

Accusing Americans of communist sympathies didn’t start with Donald Trump. Democrats as well as Republicans threw around terms like “soft on communism” during the Cold War after World War II. In the 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) made a name for himself by accusing all sorts of Americans of being communists — and a few actually were.

Last week, speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, the president said, “We have to stop this, this horrible thread of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.”

But is this simply more name-calling, more red meat for his base — or is Donald Trump on to something this time?

Let’s start with this: When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was asked on CNN if he likes capitalism, he replied, “No. I have many critiques of capitalism.”

And he recently signed on to a rent freeze that bars owners of nearly 1 million apartments in the city from raising rents for two years.

“They’re basically confiscating their property,” Trump said.

Then there’s the wealth tax, which is no longer a radical socialist idea among many Democrats.

As an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal puts it, “A wealth tax has gone from fringe to mandatory in Democratic primaries, sold on the lie that the rich don’t pay taxes. There is no serious evidence that under-taxing capital is what ails us. The DSA isn’t yet outwardly proposing to import the full Cuban model of totalitarian economic and social control, but if you doubt that’s the destination, you haven’t been listening.”

Listening, for example, to the Democratic Socialists of America platform, which calls for “public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure.”

Maybe that’s not a government takeover of all major private industries, as envisioned under communist doctrine — but it’s a start.

And there’s more. The Democratic Socialists of America want the eventual abolition of police and the immediate defunding of law enforcement budgets.

It wants massive cuts to the U.S. Defense Department budget, with the money redirected to social services and public housing.

It wants ICE abolished. It wants free childcare and Medicare for all with no co-pays and no premiums.

And Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the Mamdani-endorsed democratic socialists who won her primary contest last week, has called the United States a “f—ing disgrace” on a since-deleted X account that included phrases such as “seize the means of production,” along with calls to abolish the police, prisons and borders.

Good chance Donald Trump and congressional Republicans will hang those words around the neck of every so-called moderate Democrat in the coming months.

And after the midterms? What then?

Maybe Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won’t run for president again, but his younger acolyte, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), might. As far as the hard left is concerned, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and Hakeem Jeffries, his counterpart in the House, are yesterday’s politicians. There’s a good chance neither could win a Democratic primary if one were held today. The future, Mamdani and other democratic socialists believe, belongs to them.

And so, on election night last week, speaking to a crowd of cheering supporters, Mamdani reminded them of his own victory. “A year ago,” he said, “it was not the end of a political movement. It was the beginning.”

Maybe it’s not Moscow on the Hudson … not yet, anyway.

And forgive me for telling you what you already know: New York isn’t America. “What passes for cool radicalism in Brooklyn’s Park Slope would get you a psychiatric evaluation in most of the country,” is how Gerry Baker puts it in the Wall Street Journal.

Fair enough, but just this week another young socialist democrat defeated a longtime Democratic incumbent — this time in a deep blue congressional district in Colorado, almost 2,000 miles away from New York.

Melat Kiros who is 29 — and endorsed by Sanders — beat Diana DeGette who was elected to Congress in 1997, the year Kiros was born.

So if you think the democratic socialists were even thinking about stopping in New York in their attempt to reshape the Democratic Party, in their desire to fundamentally change America, you haven’t been paying attention.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.

‘Communist’ can be added to the list of Trump’s verbal salvos against Democrats

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