President Trump put America on alert that communists were overtaking the Democratic Party. He told a convention of the Faith & Freedom Coalition “We have to stop this, this horrible thread of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.” This sounded a lot like the First Red Scare which occurred after World War I and the Russian Revolution. Or the second Red Scare that took place after World War II as tensions grew between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Driving Trump’s Red Scare is his concern about Republicans losing control of Congress in the mid-term elections. Trump knows he will be a target for another impeachment and corruption investigations if Democrats take over.
He saw an opportunity to frighten Americans that the Democratic Party is being taken over by socialists. Hard to believe he would let a couple of self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists who won a primary election in New York lead him to this conclusion. Trump’s internal poll numbers must be worse than those being reported by news organizations.
Trump likely learned the importance of scarce tactics from Roy Cohn. Cohn played a significant role in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950’s. McCarthy claimed that communists had infiltrated the federal government. After the McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohen became a prominent New York lawyer and mentor to Donald Trump.
Trump is not the first Republican to use communism to influence an election outcome. In the 1964 battle for the party’s nomination, anti-communism became a dividing line between conservatives and moderates. Phyllis Schlafly, a strong anti-communist, often accused some politicians of being soft on communism. She wrote a book “A Choice Not an Echo”, which supported Senator Barry Goldwater and attacked the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Republican Party.
Schlafly who had ties to the John Birch Society, promoted the idea that communism influence of prominent public officials who were knowingly or unknowingly advancing communist objectives in 1964.
Not unlike Trump’s using communism to paint the Democratic Party to fit his needs…it didn’t work in 1964, and it won’t work in 2026.