Trump’s New Red Scare Isn’t About 2026. It’s About 2028.

Now that enough voters are clearly fine with the DSA that “socialist” doesn’t pack the punch that it used to, Trump has to reach for a scarier word.

“The barbarians are inside the gate — and Democrats are WELCOMING them in.” — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)

Donald Trump and Republicans have a new villain just in time for the midterms, and it’s not socialism anymore. It’s full-on communism, baby.

In the past few weeks, Trump has warned that the Democratic Party’s ascendant left wants to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”

“I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding,” he declared. “That includes World War I, World War II, September 11, it includes the Pearl Harbor attack.”

Trump’s minions have lined up to amplify the boss’ message. House Speaker Mike Johnson recently decried progressive candidates as “radicals” and “self-described, self-identifying Marxists.” “Communism is no longer a far fetched threat. It is here on our SHORES!” the Speaker warned on X.

At a June conference the U.S. hosted of 66 nations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said they “can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist, or Marxist,” but he denounced them as “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.”

“The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller proclaimed. “The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and a perfect kid and goes to church every Sunday.”

We’ve heard versions of this before. Trump branded Kamala Harris “Comrade Kamala” in 2024 (which inspired a series of memes in Latino spaces), and warned of a socialist takeover back in the 2020 election.

But this year, the rhetoric has escalated, and there’s an obvious reason why. The Democratic Socialists of America just had their best year in a generation. That started with Zohran Mamdani winning the New York City mayoral primary last year by 12 points over Andrew Cuomo, riding a 50,000-volunteer field operation to victory on a platform of a rent freeze, free buses, and free childcare.

Mamdani’s political power was put to the test in June when his endorsed candidates, Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez (whose district constitutes the “Commie Corridor,” as The American Prospect noted) won congressional primaries alongside significant DSA wins downballot.

Then in Colorado, 29-year-old DSA-endorsed newcomer Melat Kiros unseated ten-term incumbent Diana DeGette (a strong progressive, just apparently not strong enough) in a congressional primary, the biggest win yet for the state’s left flank.

Asked directly about the wave of left-wing primary wins, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “They use the word ‘Social Democrat’ because it sounds so nice, but it’s really communism you’re talking about.”

Now that enough voters are clearly fine with the DSA that “socialist” doesn’t pack the punch that it used to, Trump has to reach for a scarier word. Notice what he doesn’t do: define it. Some Republicans will tell you it’s shorthand for Medicare for All and abolishing borders and prisons. On Fox News last month with Laura Ingraham, JD Vance took a crack at it:

“I unfortunately fear that’s the direction the Democrats are headed. And it is communism, Laura. This is not — you know, this is not raising taxes a little bit, however much we might disagree with that. This is abolishing the police. This is letting criminals run amok in your cities. This is — flood your country with low-wage, third-world immigrants.”

But the point isn’t precision; it’s about setting up existential stakes for elections. If Democrats represent the communist menace, then no amount of dissatisfaction with Trump can ever add up to a vote against him. (It’s the Flight 93 election, rebranded).

And there’s plenty of dissatisfaction to paper over. Trump’s approval rating clocks in at 33 percent in the latest AP-NORC poll, down from 37 percent the month before, with the sharpest drop coming from his own party over the Iran conflict.

Voters are vexed about the economy and gas prices, angry that he started a “stupid war” in Iran after promising he wouldn’t, and wary of his refusal to release all the Epstein files. They’ve been horrified watching American citizens gunned down by federal immigration agents: Ruben Ray Martinez in a Texas traffic stop, Renee Good during an enforcement operation, and Alex Pretti while helping a fellow protester thrown to the ground.

None of that is supposed to matter once you’ve decided the alternative is “godless communism” and abortion on demand, and the only thing standing between you and that abyss is Donald Trump.

Will it work in November? I doubt it. Trump isn’t on the ballot, his numbers are in the basement, and the generic ballot currently shows Democrats ahead by 8 points to 11 points, depending on the poll. Raw anger at Trump over the economy will outweigh an abstract fear of Marxism for most swing voters this year. But it might peel off just enough soft Republicans who were thinking of sitting out the election to determine a handful of House and Senate races.

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Democrats have overperformed in recent off-year elections, in 2018’s blue wave and again in 2022 after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. But presidential elections have proved far less hospitable terrain for the party, especially as Trump has a knack for pulling in irregular voters.

Which is exactly why I think this fight is really about 2028, not 2026. Trump isn’t constitutionally allowed to run again, full stop. But he doesn’t believe in taking no for an answer and keeps insisting he’ll try anyway (He’s told reporters “I would love to do it.”) His advisers have floated “methods” for getting around the 22nd Amendment, with Steve Bannon flatly predicting Trump will get a third term. (Of course, there’s no guarantee the 80-year-old’s health will hold up long enough for him to even attempt to be on the ballot).

Without Trump, Republicans face a genuinely chaotic succession fight for 2028, with Vance, Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, and a host of others all circling.

Holding together Trump’s coalition without Trump is hard. Communism as the unifying supervillain is a two-year investment in making sure it doesn’t fall apart.

I know a lot progressive influencers and commentators think Trump’s communism attack is a punchline. I thought the same thing about the virulent anti-trans ads he ran against Harris two years ago, and I was wrong. Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars on ads with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” running them more than 30,000 times in swing states during football season.

That same message flopped in 2022, when abortion, not gender identity, was what actually moved voters in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. But by 2024, voters had heard it for two solid years. The ground was seeded and it shifted below Democrats. That’s the playbook being run again now with Republicans’ new McCarthyism.

It’s tempting to believe that the red scare messaging won’t resonate anymore because millions of voters weren’t even alive before the Berlin Wall fell.

But there’s a more than 100-year-old anti-communist tradition to draw from, dating back to the Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, and then decades more of Cold War conditioning. Sure, most Americans don’t know that history in any detail. They don’t need to. They still know communism is bad and it’s left-coded, while Trump and his party are firmly on the right. And the GOP message is aimed squarely at older and Latino voters whose families fled left-wing authoritarian governments.

Stephen Miller has long positioned Trump as the only thing standing between us and “cancerous, communist woke culture.” The Republican bet for 2028 is clear: strong and wrong beats woke and weird.

That’s enough to work with, especially with a well-funded right-wing media machine hammering the message daily, and mainstream outlets increasingly serving as an echo chamber. CBS News has already tilted rightward under Bari Weiss, handpicked by Paramount Skydance’s new owners, the Ellisons. And the Trump allies’ pending deal to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery would put CNN under the same roof (which Trump and his allies are openly salivating over).

The Trump administration also has some powerful tools at its disposal to create communist enemies and criminalize them, like National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, something Miller and Rubio both invoked at the June international conference.

So when I see progressives treating the anti-communist campaign as a joke that nobody will fall for, I get nervous. I’d like to think we’re past these scare tactics and everyone will understand the stakes of fighting fascism. But being ridiculous has never disqualified a message from working in this country. Being complete bullshit hasn’t, either (just look at who’s president … again).

Zohran Mamdani is popular and getting good national press right now, but the right-wing coverage of him is already vicious (and unrelenting). The beltway press loves nothing more than building someone up to knock them down. By 2028, he (or whoever the next high-profile DSA winner is) could be cast as the sinister face of American communism (regardless if the label bears any resemblance to what they’ve actually done).

None of this means Democrats should panic or abandon their values. But it does mean they should stop assuming a bad-faith argument can’t win. It won it in 2016. It won it in 2024. And Republicans are betting it can carry them through whatever Trump screws up next — a health crisis, recession, another war — all the way to the White House in 2028.