President Donald Trump has a new favorite midterm strategy: painting the Democratic Party as a band of godless communists. It’s not going to pan out the way he wants. 

During his speech Friday at Mount Rushmore, on the eve of Independence Day, Trump warned of 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.” The line was an unsubtle reference to the election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in 2025 and  successful left-wing candidates in recent House primaries, including a Mamdani-backed trio that won contests in New York City.

Trump described the growth of the leftists in American politics as an apocalyptic development: “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” Trump huffed. He added, “Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.”

The word “communist” is not the bogeyman it was during the 20th century or even the first decade of the 21st century.

During his remarks, Trump mentioned the term “communism” or “communist” 15 times. He invoked communism multiple times the following day in his July 4th speech. And the White House posted on X on Independence Day: “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” Right-wing influencers and Republicans have also begun to use the term to attack the left more often in recent weeks. This effort is concerted, desperate and likely doomed.

It’s standard practice for a political party to use the opposition’s most ideologically radical members to paint the entire party with the same brush. Sometimes it can be effective as a messaging strategy. But trying to portray Democrats specifically as communist seems like a dead end.

The word “communist” is not the bogeyman it was during the 20th century or even the first decade of the 21st century. The Cold War has long been over. Millennials and Gen Z Americans either were not alive or were not politically conscious at a time when communism was seen in popular culture as a serious national security and economic threat. To them, communism is a historical term, not a haunting specter. The Communist Party U.S.A. exists, but it is a tiny and politically irrelevant organization. Trump, perpetually stuck in the 1980s, likely overestimates the power of “communist” as a slur.  

Trump’s “communist” agenda is also inaccurate in a way that a good chunk of the public is likely to understand. He falsely claims that democratic socialists are no different from communists. The most prominent communist projects of the 20th century in the Soviet Union and China involved authoritarian political organizations and centrally planned economies, and were known for massive human rights abuses and dysfunction in distributing resources. By contrast, democratic socialists believe in democratic political organization and reject central planning. (This is a broad delineation; there are nuances that extend beyond the scope of this brief article.) 

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American democratic socialists today are not proposing extreme upheavals of society and economy, but modest social democratic reforms. These ideas, like publicly funded healthcare and childcare, already exist and are proven to be wildly successful in other affluent democracies. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — the most prominent living democratic socialist in America and consistently one of the most popular politicians in the country — isn’t associated with rationing food, but with taxing billionaires and demanding the popular idea of Medicare for All. 

Finally, Trump’s panning of the democratic socialist insurgency as an assault on capitalism implicitly suggests that capitalism is worth defending wholesale. That puts him in the kind of position that doesn’t suit him: defending the status quo. Meanwhile, polls in recent years have indicated a declining approval of capitalism, and slowly rising approval of — or reduced negative feelings toward — socialism. Realistically speaking, not everyone who has a favorable opinion of socialism would not be able to define what it is. But they view it broadly as a program of social equality in a deeply unequal society, not as a portal to gulags.

Of course, it may very well be the case that most of the midterm electorate remains skeptical that the small democratic socialist bloc represents the future of the Democratic Party. The movement gets a lot of attention, but that’s not the same as power. What voters will know is that Trump is in power and has done nothing for the U.S. economy except make it more comfortable for the ultrarich and more expensive for everyone else. And no appeals to 20th century bogeymans can change that.