Darn Communists!

Reds under every bed - except the one marked "Russia"

One of the most unusual sights we observed during Trump’s first term and the investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 election was the sight of MAGA-types wearing tee shirts saying, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”

The person in the image above is an AI creation, but we checked, and, yes, internet sources are still selling those shirts.

Now Trump, Vance, and Stephen Miller are setting off fire alarms about some of the “Democratic Socialists” winning Democratic primaries.

They’re not being subtle about it. After Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary last year, Trump branded him “a 100% Communist Lunatic” on Truth Social.

Vance made it explicit himself. Asked on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle” whether democratic socialists were about to “dominate” the whole Democratic Party, he didn’t hedge: “I unfortunately fear that’s the direction the Democrats are headed,” he said. “And it is communism, Laura.”

And just this week, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller went full-feral on “Hannity”: “The Democrat Party has embraced not only socialism, they’ve embraced communism. Straight-up, outright, full-throated communism,” he said - warning that Democrats want to “abolish the Senate, abolish borders, abolish prisons, abolish jails, abolish the jury system, abolish our entire way of life.”

The candidates in question ran mostly on the idea of free buses, controlling rising rents, and city-run grocery stores. Not collectivism.

A quick refresher, since the labels are flying fast: Socialism, as modern democratic socialists often invoke it, points to the ‘Nordic model’ - a capitalist market economy cushioned by robust state welfare, strong labor unions, and public investments like universal healthcare and tuition-free college. Communism, in Marx’s original definition, is something fundamentally different: a theoretical, stateless end point where private enterprise and social classes cease to exist.

In practice, every major 20th-century regime that called itself communist - the USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba - got there, or claimed to be getting there, by fusing that economic program to one-party, one-leader political control: no opposition parties, no free press, no independent courts.

That fusion is the part that matters. It’s the autocracy, not the economics, that produced the gulags, the purges, the famines, and the surveillance states people actually mean when they invoke “communism” as a threat. Sweden has more public ownership and higher taxes than the United States but no secret police. Pinochet’s Chile had neither socialism nor communism - and a very active secret police.

The common thread running through history’s worst regimes has been unchecked one-party power, whichever economic label it wore that decade.

Calling a candidate who wants free buses, and who won a fair primary, a “communist” isn’t just imprecise. It skips past the part that actually made 20th-century communism dangerous.

And, of course, in Trump’s and his quislings’ world, anyone who thinks differently “hates America.” We’ve quoted from the OSS psychological profile of Hitler before, so this part won’t surprise you:

“never concede that there may be some good in your enemy”

The full quote plus a link to the entire OSS report can be found on the Voices page of our quislings.info website.

Is it possible that some MAGA followers will hear what Trump and team are saying, look at the tee shirts they’re wearing, and contemplate the irony?

None of this is a defense of socialism, democratic or otherwise - see our own “DSA or LDA?” for why we favor the idea of “Liberty Democrats” over “Democratic Socialists.”

But it’s worth asking - why the label is resonating with voters at all? Perhaps because:

• They’re living in the one wealthy country that spends more per capita on healthcare than any other and still posts a shorter life expectancy than the universal-healthcare countries of Europe.

• And that wealth concentration has hit its highest level since the Fed started tracking it in 1989... and by longer-run historical measures, is now closing in on levels last seen in the Gilded Age.

Call the administration’s own contribution to that divide “crony capitalism” - if we’re still playing the labeling game.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Democratic socialists didn’t win one fluke race this cycle - they won several, in blue cities and blue states, campaigning on kitchen-table stuff like rent and grocery prices. Trump, Vance, and Miller could argue the policy. Instead, they reached for the oldest label in the Cold War playbook, the one built to end an argument before it starts.

Maybe that’s the real fire alarm. Not that a few dozen candidates who want cheaper rent got elected, but that the people in charge of preventing a crisis keep describing one anyway - the kind of emergency that, historically, has been used to justify postponing elections, silencing critics, and worse. We’ve studied enough Quislings to know how that can end.

Which brings us back to that tee shirt. The irony is as thick as it is dangerous: the same movement warning that city-run grocery stores will usher in Soviet tyranny is actively praising autocratic control, maligning democratic elections, and branding its own domestic political rivals the “enemy from within” - supposedly more dangerous, in Trump’s own words, than China or Russia.

You can wear the shirt that says you’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat. Just don’t act surprised when the administration delivers on the promise.

Sources

Trump, “a 100% Communist Lunatic” — Time

Trump, “enemy from within” — NBC News

Vance, “it is communism, Laura” — The Hill

Miller, “full-throated communism” — Florida’s Voice

Sweden’s tax burden vs. the U.S. — OECD, Revenue Statistics 2025 (Sweden’s tax-to-GDP ratio tops 40%; the U.S. sits below 30%)

Sweden’s state-owned enterprises — Government Offices of Sweden, State Ownership Policy (Vattenfall, LKAB, PostNord, SJ, and dozens more)

Sweden’s civil-liberties record — Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Sweden

Pinochet-era repression in Chile — National Security Archive, “The Pinochet Regime Declassified”

U.S. healthcare spending vs. life expectancy — Commonwealth Fund and Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker

U.S. wealth concentration — CBS News, citing Federal Reserve data (highest since the Fed began tracking in 1989); World Inequality Lab / World Inequality Report 2026 (longer-run comparison to Gilded Age levels)

Our related piece — “DSA or LDA?”