Gallup: 43% of Americans now view socialism positively
Speaking in the Oval Office this week, President Trump repeated his proposal to give $5,000 to every adult in the U.S. — but only if Republicans win the House and Senate in November. He first floated the idea at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month.
Conservative allies greeted the proposal with skepticism from the moment Trump proposed it. Broadcasting from the convention, Michael Duncan — one host of the conservative Ruthless podcast — said that while the proposal might be politically smart, the better policy might be to instead “just cut taxes by $5,000.” “We don’t need helicopter money,” he added. His co-host Josh Holmes agreed: “Maybe we don’t have a bureaucrat who shuffles paper from the left side of his desk to the right and then sends you a check for your time.”
The right-leaning satire site the Babylon Bee was more pointed. One headline read: “Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government.”
The contradiction has become a recurring feature of Trump’s second term: the leader of a party that has often claimed to support free markets repeatedly trying to bend the economy to his will while continuing to label Democrats “communists.” At the convention, Trump said: “We will defeat the communists, and that’s what they are. They’re not socialists, they’re not democrats, they’re communists.” Millions heard a similar message in a television ad that aired last week, in which Trump says: “Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America.” The ad states at the end that it was funded by the federal government; an ethics group has filed a lawsuit against taxpayer money being used for the overtly political advertisement.
The Trump administration has also announced equity stakes in more than 30 private companies, imposed dozens of tariffs, and taken the unusual step of trying to lower interest rates via the Treasury Department — moves NPR’s reporting characterized as “certainly not communism” but also “not typical Republican free-market capitalism.” When it comes to dissonance with Trump’s anger at what he calls communism, the government’s equity stakes in an array of companies have maybe gotten the most attention.
Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, offered a label for the approach. “I would say transactional interventionism,” Lincicome said. To Lincicome, Trump has no set economic philosophy. Instead, many of the president’s policy moves aim at a specific outcome — whether using a tariff to boost a particular industry or punish a foreign country, or suggesting a $5,000 check to reward votes. “He is very transactional,” Lincicome said. “He thinks of all of these issues in a silo and he does whatever, you know, whatever he wants in terms of the direction. It’s not free market or socialist. It just is.”
In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said the president is “implementing traditional free market policies that do work — like deregulation and tax cuts — while rectifying longtime America-Last policies that have left Americans behind.”
The U.S. government has taken equity stakes in private companies before — most famously during the financial crisis, when it helped auto companies and banks. But Jonathan Hillman, senior fellow for geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations, who also worked in the Biden administration’s Commerce and State departments, said the current wave is different. “I think what’s different right now is that the number of deals is striking,” Hillman said. “I think you may ask, ‘Well, you know, in the past there were crises. What’s the crisis now?’” Hillman has tallied 39 deals so far. “I do feel like there is some urgency to addressing some of these areas,” he said. “But again, I think the level of deal activity is notable, and I also think we’ve just seen the beginning of this.”
Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric has unfolded alongside interactions with political figures on the left. Last week, at an appearance with Zohran Mamdani, Trump said of the New York City mayor: “I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential, got great potential.” Mamdani is a democratic socialist. Days later, Trump welcomed China’s communist President Xi Jinping to the U.S. for a White House visit, describing Xi in a social media post as “strong, vibrant, and fit.” Trump has multiple times praised Xi — calling him “tough,” “smart” and a “great leader” — even as he speaks of China as a rival the U.S. must defeat.
Gallup reported recently that 43% of Americans have a positive view of socialism, a new high — suggesting the “socialist” label may be losing its sting. Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Columbia University, said Americans’ definitions of “communism” and “socialism” vary widely. “With the term ‘socialism,’ people tend to be all over the place when asked to provide some kind of understanding of what that term means,” Berman said, pointing to the policies embraced by people who use the label. “‘We want a more interventionist government. We want the public provision of some basic things that everybody needs,’ you know, healthcare, free education, yada, yada, yada. That’s social democracy. That’s not communism.”
Berman added that Americans with family from Cuba, the former Soviet Union, or authoritarian states like Venezuela “have something very specific that they are thinking of, and they do not like that term. Those are the kinds of folks that Trump is trying to appeal to.” The “communist” label also likely resonates with Americans old enough to remember the nearly half-century-long Cold War.
With just over two years left in Trump’s term, the question of what comes after him is gaining attention. Lincicome, at the Cato Institute, said Trump has opened new policy doors for his successor. “The next administration can come in and suddenly say, ‘Oh, well, the last one did this. So we’re going to take these equity stakes and do something with them, or we’re going to take new equity stakes,’” Lincicome said. “And so, again, we’re really just operating in this gray area of expansive new power.” And as soon as the midterms are over, the talk about who’s leading that next administration will only accelerate.