Trump repeats communism warnings; State Department publishes Cuba report

DSA membership debate continues alongside Republican attacks on Democrats

“A generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism, there 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,” Trump said in the July 3 Mount Rushmore address, delivered on the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday. He pledged to “vanquish communists quickly” and “send them into exile.”

The State Department this week reinforced that theme with the release of “Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The 100-page report asserts that “for nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States” and that the “highest reaches” of the U.S. government have been “infiltrated” by a network that “continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

Trump’s focus on communism is grounded in his upbringing, scholars told the Guardian. He was born three months before Winston Churchill delivered his 1946 “iron curtain” speech ushering in the Cold War, and the anti-communist campaigns of Senator Joe McCarthy were a fixture of his childhood. Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel who helped prosecute convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, later became Trump’s mentor in New York real estate.

“Trump is 80 years old, and for him, the epithet ‘communist’ rolls off his lips quite naturally, because it was part of the conflict with internal communism and the Soviet Union as an external communist foe that was part of his formation,” Bill Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow and former White House domestic policy adviser under Bill Clinton, told the Guardian.

Galston questioned whether the message can resonate beyond the Republican base, pointing to an Economist/YouGov poll in which 18% of voters called communism a “major threat,” 25% a “minor threat,” and 33% said it was “not a threat.” “He’s speaking to a political party that is disproportionately supported by older Americans,” Galston said. “So one way of looking at this is as part of Trump’s overall strategy of base mobilization. He’s preaching to the choir here and he knows intuitively who makes up that choir.”

Recent primary victories by DSA-endorsed candidates have coincided with the Republican messaging. In June, Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated veteran Representative Adriano Espaillat in a New York Democratic primary. Chevalier later faced scrutiny over a now-deleted Twitter account that praised Marxist ideology and figures such as Vladimir Lenin.

Several prominent Democrats dismissed Trump’s characterizations. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and DSA member, called the communist label “very silly.” She told reporters, “They want to call it communist because they don’t want you to know that Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada — everybody else — has it better than us, and we spend the most money for the worst care in the developed world.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism, wrote on X: “Not subtle: new party line is to associate Communists with every crime, every offense. Create a sense of Communist threat to justify a rightwing crackdown. Old playbook used with coups and Fascist takeovers.”

Cara Tobe, a DSA spokesperson, said the organization’s “dues-paying members range in political beliefs, but we are all united under the banner of democratic socialism,” adding, “It’s concerning but not surprising that Donald Trump would like to send his opponents into exile, because it’s increasingly evident our ideas win with the American people: socialism beats fascism.”

The DSA’s internal politics have added weight to Republican attacks. Founded in 1982 by leftwing activist Michael Harrington, the organization originally barred members of “democratic centralist” groups — language widely understood to refer to Soviet-style communist parties. Harvey Klehr, an emeritus professor at Emory University and an expert on the history of American communism, told the Guardian that the repeal of that rule led to an influx of radicals.

“The DSA has changed, and a significant number of people who unapologetically call themselves Marxist-Leninists or communists have moved into DSA and attained some significant positions,” Klehr said. He compared the shift to the “entryist” infiltration of Britain’s Labour party by the Militant tendency in the early 1980s, which contributed to a decisive election defeat under Margaret Thatcher and led Labour leader Neil Kinnock to expel the faction.

Klehr said Trump’s charge is “not entirely a bugaboo,” according to the Guardian. He argued that the presence of communists within the DSA raises broader dangers for democratic society, comparing the trend to the movement of rightwing extremists into the Republican party. “It’s the same sort of thing that occurred on the political right not that many years ago, when various kinds of rightwing lunatics, neo-Nazis and racists began to move into the Republican party, they won some primaries, they established a beachhead and they’re still there,” Klehr said.