The party of property has spent a hundred years saying the word “communism” and the last year proving it does not know what the word means. Its champion runs the state like a family treasury, and the respectable press, which cannot find a word for what it sees, calls him a communist. Both are wrong. The word is doing the lying.
Donald Trump has spent his second term pairing the old red-baiting anti-communist messaging with economic moves the news desk can only call unorthodox: television ads promising that “together, we will defeat communism,” as if the ghost of Lenin were knocking on suburban garage doors; more than $10 billion in taxpayer funds shoveled into equity stakes in Intel and a range of critical-minerals ventures; an option on Westinghouse; a golden share in the Nippon Steel purchase of US Steel; a promise of $5,000 to every American if the party holds Congress. The press reads the list and calls the president the red menace. The party reads the ads and calls the man holding the spoon the last line of defense. Neither has looked at the spoon.
Give the administration its best case first, because the best case is not nothing. The V-Dem project at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the most careful democracy-watchers on the planet, has measured state ownership of the economy across countries for two decades. From 2002 through 2024 the United States ranked among the four least state-controlled economies on Earth; in 2024, second. In 2025, the first year of the second term, it fell to sixteenth. Read that number again. Sixteenth. By the same accounting, the federal stake in the economy remains smaller than in 163 countries — including Norway, the developmental states of East Asia, the state-guided capitalist powerhouse of Singapore, and any number of regimes the actual left has spent a century denouncing as insufficiently revolutionary. Ten billion dollars in a thirty-trillion-dollar economy is a rounding error. The stake in Westinghouse is a hedge against Chinese dominance of civilian nuclear power. The golden share is the textbook instrument every serious industrial power, from France to Japan, uses to keep strategic industries out of foreign hands. Norway holds a majority stake in its national oil company, which is why Norway has a sovereign wealth fund larger than the GDP of most countries. Even the actual communist superpower runs a private sector that contributes sixty percent of its GDP. To call this communism is to call the defense budget communism. It is to call the Export-Import Bank communism. The real ancestors are not Marx and Lenin but Alexander Hamilton, whose 1791 Report on Manufactures argued that a young republic must nurture its strategic industries, and Henry Clay, whose American System built the industrial Midwest with tariffs and state investment. The order Trump is dismantling is not the order that built the American middle class. It is the order that destroyed it. And the strangest thing about the fight is who agrees with whom: the old dependency theorists and the populist right arrive at the same diagnosis by opposite roads — the periphery is milked by the core, the working class is milked by the order. The diagnoses converge; the remedies differ; neither is communism.
Notice what this leaves the critics. The first position is that any state equity stake is communism — which would retire the Norwegian oil fund, French rail and nuclear, and the Singapore model in one blow. The second is that the specific investments lack discipline — a critique that, if true, would still leave us miles from Marx and Lenin. Both positions are true in ways their holders do not intend. The first is true because a rounding error is not a revolution. The second is true in the way that damns.
The conduct is the family business. Strategic industrial policy has a strategy: it picks sectors with a defensible comparative advantage, builds them with patient capital, and exits when the firms can stand. Trump’s acquisitions have none of that discipline. They are appetitive, personal, and political. The targets shift with the news cycle. The terms are whatever the president wants on a given Tuesday. The companies that get federal money are the ones whose executives learn to flatter him; the ones that do not get regulated into the ground. And the golden share is the most obscene arrangement yet: the federal government now owns a piece of a Japanese company’s stake in one of the most storied American corporations. If you wanted to design a system to teach a generation of capitalists that the rules only apply to losers, this is what you would build. This is not South Korea building a steel industry. This is not Hamilton building an American System; Hamilton had a plan, a Congress, a century. This is a family business running a country.
The critics who call it communism reach for Marx, and they have the right book. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his account of the 1851 coup, was written, he said, “to demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” Substitute a Manhattan address for a Parisian one and the prose lands. But the text explains the critics better than it explains the president. The grotesque mediocrity was not a communist. He was a nullity who filled a vacuum, and the bourgeois press of the 1850s treated him as a serious statesman. Trump has not read Marx. The critics have read so much of him that they see Louis-Napoléon in every president who inconveniences them. His model is not the Politburo. It is the family fiefdom. The cold-war dictatorships this country used to back — Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua — governed by treating the state as a private treasury and the treasury as a private inheritance. Trump’s crypto dealings alone would make any of those old kleptocrats blush with admiration. Even the Chinese system, for all its repressiveness, requires a coherent technocratic class executing a long industrial strategy. Trump does not have the patience for that, and he does not have the people. What he has is the appetite — and a movement that has mistaken the appetite for a philosophy.
Which brings us to the movement, because the blindness is the story. It can barely finish a sentence without warning that Zohran Mamdani’s plan for a handful of city-run grocery stores in New York is the thin edge of a socialist wedge. It is correct that bodegas run by the state would be a real change. It is wrong that this is the change to worry about. The actual takeover of the productive economy is happening in Washington, under the president the movement owns, with the movement’s votes, while the movement’s consultants write the ads about the other side. The $5,000 promise is written on a napkin. The money does not exist; when it is borrowed into existence, it will not be paid back by the men who took the golden share. It will come out of SNAP, out of Medicaid, out of the schools in the very counties that voted for the man handing out the checks. Take from the bottom, give to the top, and call it patriotism. Even the anti-communist ads were paid for with public money. The party of property is paying public money to fear the ghost of its own champion.
And what is it, then, if not communism? It is the rentier state. The deepest irony of the label is that it flatters the deed: it dignifies a chaos of appetite with the name of a system. The actual communists are in Beijing — the surveillance state, the Uyghur internment camps, the military buildup, the Party’s monopoly on political power. Against that, the president’s equity stakes are not a revolution; they are an accounting error inflated by the flattery of the fearful. Even the analyst most sympathetic to the critics concedes the structural point. Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute, whose V-Dem numbers started the fight, notes that Trump “clearly wants to be king” but that this kind of control “is much harder to achieve in a modern complex economy.” The political economy will not let him: the country is too complex, too plural, too invested in property for any president to impose the central planning that defined the Soviet system. But that is precisely the point the movement refuses to hear — the appetite is real even where the system is impossible. I used to trade paper claims on next year’s corn from a desk in Chicago. I know what an abstraction costs the people who grow the real thing. The word “communist,” in this year’s mouth, is the most profitable abstraction in politics. The press uses it because it cannot name the rentier. The movement uses it because it cannot bear to.
The movement that promised to conserve the family, the town, the mediating institution, the wide distribution of property now vouches for the man who feeds on all of them. Conserve what, exactly? The answer to the golden share was never a different golden share. It is the share held by the people who do the work — the cooperative, the credit union, the mutual, the employee-owned mill, the town that owns itself. The commissar and the rentier dissolve the same thing: property in the hands of the many, the mediating institution, the local life. It is harder than the decree. The cooperative is a homelier machine than the nationalization and the leveraged buyout alike. But it centralizes nothing, and that is the whole point.
Call him a communist if the word pleases you. Communist he is not. The communists are not at the gates, and the communists are not in the suite. The rentier is in the suite, with the party of property vouching for him — and the only answer to the rentier is the thing he cannot buy and the commissar cannot plan: property in the hands of the many, where the word has no use at all.