Trump Attacks Socialism Because He Knows Americans Want It

On The Joe Rogan Experience Wednesday, Rogan and J. D. Vance got reflective about socialism, a phenomenon that has been particularly troubling Donald Trump and his allies, especially after a string of electoral victories by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) last month.Vance agreed with Rogan — a 2020 Bernie Sanders supporter who voted for Trump in 2024 — that the socialist movement attracted many “kind and empathetic people” but also that its popularity was cause for concern. Vance said socialism was “crazy” but an understandable response to Americans’ economic struggles. “Extreme wealth inequality does create problems,” he said.On DSA specifically, Vance said, “I think their ideas are crazy and . . . will lead to a very totalitarian place. “But,” he added, “I tend to be a bit more empathetic. Why are young people attracted to socialism in twenty-first-century America?” He recalled Charlie Kirk pointing out, right before his death, “if you don’t give young people a stake, if you don’t give them ownership, if you don’t give them a sense of the American dream and of possibility in the future, they’re going to become socialists.” Vance continued:So I think that unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome. Do I think that’s good? No. But I really do worry . . . if — man, if we don’t fix that and I would say if we don’t get back to a more Christian sort of understanding of economics, socialism is the alternative. Like that is where this goes.JOE ROGAN: Well, people don’t own anything.J. D. VANCE: Exactly. And in some ways, Joe, the game is rigged.Vance spoke in gentler terms than some other Trump administration officials worried about the popularity of socialism. In much darker and more vindictive language, Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a conference about “left-wing violence” in Washington, DC, on Thursday, attended by representatives from about sixty countries. Rubio called the Left “a unique evil rooted in a deep resentment toward civilization.” At the same gathering, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called the Left “fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, and by jealousy,” and the administration announced visa restrictions on members of some left political groups, invoking the alarmingly broad concept of “economic sabotage.”Trump has spoken in similarly repressive terms, recently reposting a video from far-right media personality Michael Savage arguing (in all caps, like many Trump posts) “DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED, LEADERS DEPORTED,” including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who Trump has in the past year called “my little communist mayor” but also a “very rational person, a man who really wants to see New York be great again”). Trump has also lately been rambling about “communism,” which hasn’t been part of mainstream American politics in decades but is often, in the anxious elite right-wing imagination, shorthand for any opposition to oligarchy and unfettered American-style capitalism.These vilifications are coming, unsurprisingly, at a time when “democratic socialism” is very much on the rise, which makes launching a new Red Scare slightly difficult for the Right. Bernie Sanders is one of the most popular figures in American politics; so is Zohran Mamdani. On the Fourth of July at Mount Rushmore, then, with the DSA victories in New York City, Colorado, and elsewhere top of mind, Trump rose to the challenge by channeling Joe McCarthy.“America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen,” Trump vowed:It’s like a cancer. You’ve got to cut it out. . . .  Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head in America. We’re not going to let it happen.This is standard right-wing stuff. Yet there are a few interesting wrinkles. In the midst of his demonization of socialism, Trump almost sounds wistful about the Left at times, as if he wants to be on this intriguingly ascendant team.“I would be the greatest communist in history,” he mused recently. “I’d be right up there with Lenin.”As if talking himself down from this looming temptation, he added that present-day “communism” was one of the worst dangers this country had ever faced. When you “go communist,” he mused, “you never come back. You die in squalor. You die a horrible death. You die in squalor, and it gets very evil and nasty.”In a way, Trump is reverting to McCarthyism because he is an old man losing his grip on the world and this is familiar terrain for him. McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn was his mentor. He feels at home in a Red Scare. But Trump’s recent obsession with communism isn’t just the mad ravings of a man feeling the zeitgeist, along with his own marbles, slipping away from him, nor is it simple nostalgia or a desperate default to something that once worked for the Right. Like Vance, Rubio, and all the other right-wingers freaking out about DSA, Trump is also fretting — rationally — about a potentially formidable foe.The proof is all over the place. Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race last year, then socialists executed nearly a clean sweep in congressional and state legislative races in New York. Francesca Hong is performing strongly in Wisconsin’s race for governor, and Colorado’s Melat Kiros will soon be heading to Congress; progressives who don’t identify as socialists but share many of its basic agenda items like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed are performing well in their races.And as Vance acknowledged, the policy agenda of the twenty-first-century socialist movement on everything from affordable housing to higher wages to Medicare for All is wildly popular. The Trump administration knows this better than anyone else, because Trump himself ran a 2024 campaign that emphasized working-class issues like the high cost of living. He never had any intention of acting on those issues, but he knew they were powerful talking points in an election. Now Trump and MAGA face a socialist movement that is actually serious about legislating to make life easier for working-class people — and it’s got them worried.DSA is clearly living rent-free — or at least with a rent freeze, if you will – in the heads of Trump and his close associates. Their comments have been weird and even contradictory at times, but they reflect the Right’s fear that the Left is gathering strength and building a movement, and that it holds solutions to problems that neither the Right nor the center can solve. On those points, at least, Trump and co. are correct.