Speaking at Mount Rushmore on Friday to commemorate the 250th anniversary of our nation, President Donald Trump sounded the alarm: “As we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack.” He observed that “a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.”
There was no doubt whatsoever that what he was saying was true, and that thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, communism is indeed resurgent in the U.S. The establishment media confirmed this by falling easily back into its old Cold War habit of sneering at foes of communism as if patriots were fabricating the threat entirely, or at very least wildly exaggerating it in order to advance their own agenda.
The New York Times report was dripping with so much contempt that you’d think it was the good old days again, when they were sneering at Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Trump,” sniffed the Gray Lady, “read from an apocalyptic script as the stony faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln looked on. He said the word ‘communism’ so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.” You'd think Trump had done something really gauche like ask Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall. (Back in 1987, when Ronald Reagan actually called on Soviet top dog Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, the Times complained that the president was "using this speech to portray Moscow as the villain in the arms race.")
Trump, the rootless cosmopolites continued, was — horror of horrors — “not subtle.” He declared that communism was “‘the enemy of July 4, 1776.’ He called it a bigger threat than Pearl Harbor and even 9/11. He name-checked Karl Marx.”
As well he should, for Marx is the intellectual godfather behind the communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s petulant 250th anniversary remarks, in which he whined that “the powerful” view America as “an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.”
Trump didn’t address Mamdani’s remarks directly, but he made it very clear that he knew what they represented: the politics of envy and hatred, which leads to social upheaval, total government control, and the state’s enslavement of its citizens. “These are not mere political disagreements,” Trump said, “like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country.”
Speaking accurately about communism in a way that the New York Times hasn’t done since its Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter Walter Duranty covered up Stalin’s Ukrainian famine, Trump said that it was “the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.” He added: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
That is undeniable, both because communism is an internationalist system that rejects all nationalism, and because it considers allegiance to anything but the international working class (which is in reality the bosses of whatever communist system is at hand) to be an unacceptable attachment to bourgeois capitalism.
Related: Mamdani Gives 250th Anniversary Speech, and Boy, Does This Guy Hate America
Continuing in his classic Trumpian fashion, the president said that “the Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work. Communism is a loser. It always was, and it is. Right now, it’s a big loser. Look at the people that are promoting it.” Trump has called a lot of people losers over the years, and in this case his usage may seem odd, given the fact that Democratic Socialists of America candidates have just won some impressive victories, and the Marxists appear to be on the march in America.
Trump is, however, entirely correct. Communism is an ideology for losers, as it punishes the productive for their productivity and rewards the thugs who manage to seize and hold power, all while presenting itself as the triumph of social justice and equality of rights for all. Only losers would fall for that lie, and only slaves would submit to it, and Trump doesn’t want to see America become the land of either one.
“Tonight,” the president said, “we gather on the eve of one of the most extraordinary days in the history of the world. Tomorrow we mark 250 years of glorious independence and 250 years of majestic American freedom – nothing like it.” Indeed there isn’t. And now that we have come this far, it would be a world-historical tragedy to lose it all to the most obviously failed ideology in the history of the world.
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