Trump keeps crying about 'communists' and we know why | Opinion
President Donald Trump wants American voters to believe that 11 candidates for the 435-seat U.S. House of Representatives are the most terrifying threat our country has ever faced, because they identify as democratic socialists.
Worse than World War I, World War II or the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Trump argues. No, really.
That's just standard Trumpian projection and deflection. He needs to scare you because he fears the Republican Party losing control of Congress in November's midterm elections.
Trump deployed fearmongering messaging all across the month of June, trying to convince voters that our country is being overwhelmed by "godless communists."
Here is what motivates that messaging: The Democrats are in an excellent position to overturn the slim Republican majority to win control of the House and could grab the Senate, too. Trump wants to link Democrats directly to the threat he's pitching to America.
Linguists and political scientists who study this sort of rhetoric easily spotted Trump's pattern of using speech to drive fear. The democratic socialists weren't that impressed, either.
Does Donald Trump know what communism is?
Trump, in a 50-minute speech on June 26 at a Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, conflated democratic socialism with communism 16 times, including three times when he told the evangelical crowd their political enemies are "godless communists."
David Beaver, a linguist and professor at The University of Texas at Austin, told me Trump's invocation of communism doesn't involve that particular Marxist ideology and is really just "us-them politics" that played well for that evangelical audience.
Beaver examined Trump speech patterns going back to 2020 and found recently what he called "some uptick in Truth Social name-calling and fearmongering." That, the professor noted, is cyclical because there are long spans when the president doesn't mention communism at all.
"So 'communism' is not a constant organizing frame in Trump's rhetoric, but rather is episodically deployed depending on what's in the news and who he's attacking," Beaver said.
Trump also used his website Truth Social numerous times in June to "conflate" alarm about communism with the rise of democratic socialist candidates in places like New York, where three House candidates defeated the Democratic Party's establishment candidates in the June 23 primary.
Daniel Treisman, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told me Trump "wants to capitalize" on those recent wins, to take advantage of any discomfort felt by independent or Democratic Party voters.
"When Trump thinks a rhetorical trope works for him, he uses it everywhere," Treisman said. "With Republicans widely predicted to underperform in the midterms, exploiting the discomfort of mainstream voters with big-city socialists offers a possible path to victory against the odds."
Trump, in a rambling and repetitive answer when asked on June 29 about democratic socialists, tried to cast them again as communists while suggesting absurdly that the movement was "the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding."
As is so often the case with Trump, his math doesn't add up.
Just how many of these scary socialists are vying for Congress?
It can be challenging to track how many democratic socialists are on the ballot each year, because they tend to run in Democratic Party primaries. So I asked the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for a roster.
Priscilla Yeverino, a DSA spokesperson, sent me a list of three House candidates that the national organization had endorsed ‒ Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb of Philadelphia, Melat Kiros in Denver and Oliver Larkin in South Florida.
Yeverino also provided a list of nine other "notable" House candidates endorsed by their local DSA chapters in eight states. Of those candidates, one in Pennsylvania dropped out before the primary, three in New York won their primaries, four will compete in Aug. 4 primaries, and one advanced to a runoff with a longtime Democratic incumbent on Nov. 3.
So Trump's sweeping threat is really 11 DSA candidates in U.S. House races, along with DSA candidates running for state or local offices in several states. The real worry for the president is that they're reaching voters.
"It's apparent 'Democratic Socialist' is no longer a successful scare tactic, so Trump has pivoted to 'Godless communists'," Yeverino told me, adding that the DSA advocates free universal health care, tuition-free college, childcare and affordable housing. "Attempts to smear us as extreme will continue to fall short because Americans agree with the policies we fight for every day."
I live in the House district in Philadelphia that Rabb easily won in the May 19 Democratic primary, defeating three other candidates, one of whom was formerly the chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. I often wrote, while working as a journalist for Philadelphia newspapers, about Rabb's fights with establishment Democrats in the city.
Rabb spoke to me on June 30, just before catching a flight to go campaign in Denver with Kiros on the day of her Colorado Democratic primary election. Kiros won her primary later that day.
Rabb told me that the DSA candidates in 2026 were not household names when their campaigns launched, but they share a popular political platform.
He shrugged off Trump's rhetoric and told me the real challenge is finding a way for the democratic socialists and the Democratic Party to join forces.
"I could care less what Trump says," Rabb said. "This is more an internal skirmish here that can either become a full-blown war, or it could be a pivot point where the more enlightened members of the Democratic Party say, you know what, they're winning and we need to understand why."
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump keeps crying about 'communists' and we know why | Opinion
Reporting by Chris Brennan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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This story was originally published July 1, 2026 at 12:00 PM.