{"id":2887,"date":"2026-07-07T08:36:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T08:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=2887"},"modified":"2026-07-07T08:36:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T08:36:06","slug":"trumps-out-of-ammunition-and-nobodys-buying-his-new-scary-excuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=2887","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s out of ammunition \u2014 and nobody’s buying his new ‘scary’ excuse"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he\u2019s now talking about the \u201ccommunist menace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump was betrayed by world leaders he never should have trusted: analysis<\/a><\/p>\n

He can\u2019t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can\u2019t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn\u2019t settled the war in Ukraine on \u201cDay 1.\u201d He can\u2019t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular. <\/p>\n

So, facing the midterm elections, what\u2019s left? <\/p>\n

He\u2019s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes \u2014 accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.<\/p>\n

He kicked off America\u2019s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the \u201ccommunist menace.\u201d With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called \u201cradicals\u201d and \u201cextremists.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh, please. <\/em><\/p>\n

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating). <\/p>\n

But he hasn\u2019t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans. <\/p>\n

So now he\u2019s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks. <\/p>\n

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers. <\/p>\n

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the \u201cpitiful squealing\u201d of \u201cthose egg-sucking phony liberals\u201d who \u201cwould hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,\u201d and forced American citizens to \u201cname names.\u201d <\/p>\n

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party\u2019s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a \u201cbattle between Republicanism and communism,\u201d and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with \u201cpink puppets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions\u2019 advocacy for civil rights as the work of \u201cnorthern communists.\u201d Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions\u2019 Southern organizing campaign \u201ca communist plot,\u201d fearing it would result in more Black people voting. \u201cWe\u2019re asleep at the switch,\u201d he warned. \u201cThey\u2019re taking over this country; we\u2019ve got to stop them if we want this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s likely that Trump\u2019s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy\u2019s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories. <\/p>\n

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father\u2019s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man\u2019s career. <\/p>\n

\u201cSon-of-a-b<\/em>\u201d my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.<\/p>\n

As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: \u201cUntil this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s late-night rants reveal a darker problem with the president: expert<\/a><\/p>\n

I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.<\/p>\n

McCarthy didn\u2019t stop attacking the young attorney.<\/p>\n

\u201cSon-of-a-b!<\/em>\u201d my father shouted, even louder.<\/p>\n

At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. \u201cLet us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy\u2019s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48. <\/p>\n

During those hearings, McCarthy\u2019s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953. <\/p>\n

After McCarthy\u2019s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft \u2014 eventually to become Trump\u2019s mentor. <\/p>\n

So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play. <\/p>\n

The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism. <\/p>\n

New York\u2019s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle\u2019s Katie Wilson, Colorado\u2019s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others \u2014 including many who have won recent primaries \u2014 are popular because they\u2019re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans. <\/p>\n

Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word \u201csocialism\u201d compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward \u201ccapitalism.\u201d A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent). <\/p>\n

I can understand Gen Z\u2019s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can\u2019t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can\u2019t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism \u2014 or whatever you want to call our current system \u2014 has failed them. And they\u2019re <\/em>the future of America. <\/p>\n

So I doubt Trump\u2019s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms. <\/p>\n

To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump\u2019s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government. <\/p>\n

Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn\u2019t give a fig about capitalism, and he\u2019s not worried about communism or socialism. He\u2019s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.<\/p>\n

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https:\/\/robertreich.substack.com\/.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Republicans\u2019 real agenda was never about legality \u2014and it\u2019s a scam<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he\u2019s now talking about the \u201ccommunist menace.\u201dHe can\u2019t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can\u2019t talk about foreign policy, because his w…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump's out of ammunition \u2014 and nobody's buying his new 'scary' excuse - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=2887\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump's out of ammunition \u2014 and nobody's buying his new 'scary' excuse - Next Address America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he\u2019s now talking about the \u201ccommunist menace.\u201dHe can\u2019t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. 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