Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finalized the Republican plank for the upcoming midterm election. It will not be about affordability, inflation, and the economy. It will not be about Trump’s undeclared war. The position going forward will be about communism.
“The election will be over whether we’re gonna maintain our freedom in a constitutional republic,” said Johnson at a recent press conference, “that is the question on the ballot this fall.”
Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, he added, needs an additional $350,000,000,000 for various things. “You heard the president talk about how he wants to effectively double the funding for national defense. Look, we live in dangerous times. We’re fighting communism on our own shores.”
Once upon a time, the Republican faction of the uniparty championed tax breaks, however those days are over. “We’re not arguing over marginal tax rates anymore,” Johnson warned. “We’re arguing on whether or not freedom is going to survive.”
Mike did not mention specifics, but then he didn’t need to. He was talking about the socialist Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected mayor of the largest city in the nation. He was talking about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They won 35 primary elections this year. “DSA-backed candidates sent shockwaves through Congress after two high-profile congressional primaries in New York,” the Washington Examiner reported.
“Americans overall continue to be skeptical of socialism, but Democrats are the exception. Since 2016, more Democrats have held positive views of socialism than of capitalism, with the gap expanding to 24 points today,” Gallup reported in September. Democrats prefer democratic socialism to capitalism by a 58 point margin, the DSA Fund and Jacobin reported the same month, and note that socialism wins overall with likely voters under forty-five years old.
For Republicans, particularly those aligned with Trump and the MAGA movement, the evolving political environment poses a significant existential risk, which is why Trump now denounces communism. In late June, the president said:
The Communists are finally making their move. I’ve been waiting and preparing for this for a long time. It’s easy to be a Communist — All you have to do is say, ‘I’ll give you everything,’ but that means you’re taking it away from others that have earned it. Over thousands of years, that Ideology has not worked once.
Democratic socialists advocate for political democracy and social ownership within either a market or planned economy, whereas communism seeks to establish a classless, stateless society characterized by collective ownership. Marxist communism frequently dismisses gradual reform in favor of revolutionary transformation. Both are variants of socialism.
Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and AOC are not revolutionary communists like Mao or Che Guevara, but rather cosmopolitan establishment democrat socialists. They advocate for more social spending, not a dictatorship of the proletariat.
“We can’t take care of daycare,” Trump said earlier this month. “We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.”
Last month, the wealthiest man on the planet, the trillionaire Elon Musk, advocated for the invocation of the Communist Control Act, a Senate bill that passed 85-0 in 1954. It was signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower during the Second Red Scare of the Cold War.
The law outlawed the Communist Party USA and criminalized both membership and support. The membership of the Communist Party USA peaked at around 70,000 members during the Great Depression and, by the end of the 1940s and the start of the Red Scare, membership had decreased significantly.
Other organizations considered by the government to be communist or influenced by communism were investigated. Members of civil rights organizations and labor unions were considered suspicious. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI investigated, surveilled, and arrested communists and suspected communists. In 1951, an FBI investigation led to the arrest, prosecution, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage.
TRUMP: Communism is the greatest threat to our country since World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11! pic.twitter.com/Fr9ydz7lpQ
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 28, 2026
As of the first week of July, President Trump had condemned communism over 80 times. “It’s becoming a communist party. These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless Communists,” he said, despite the fact zero candidates associated with the Communist Party have ever been elected to state or federal office.
“The reality is that none of these major political figures in the Democratic Party, even those further out on the left, are identifying as communists,” explained Marc Selverstone, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs.
Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s rhetorical initiative is a flawed strategy for winning the midterm elections. MAGA is unresponsive to the concerns of numerous voters, irrespective of their political party.
A considerable portion of the electorate, especially younger Americans, is profoundly impacted by escalating prices. Approximately 50% indicate that they are significantly affected by inflation. Additionally, the surge in housing costs is a critical issue, with 41% of young voters saying it has a substantial effect on them.
The economy and Trump’s unpopular war against Iran will determine the outcome of the November midterms, not the specious claim radical and godless communists will decide the election outcome and destroy Western civilization.
Reprinted with permission from Another Day in the Empire.
