On January 1st of this year, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, was sworn in as mayor of New York City. His election, along with a few electoral victories for fellow democratic socialists, sent shock waves through the country, especially through conservative and Republican circles. You may have noticed the recent coordinated messaging of Republicans from the president on down, warning Americans of the dangers of socialism and communism.
And well they may, because Mamdani has wasted no time, already implementing several socialist policies. Under his leadership, New York City has taken ownership stakes in at least 30 private companies, from semiconductor manufacturing to mineral and rare earth mining to nuclear energy—meaning that not only does his government now partially own these means of production (the textbook definition of socialism), it is acting as regulator, customer, financier, and shareholder: a dizzying cocktail of conflicts of interest.
He has used billions of taxpayer dollars to directly intervene in markets as well, artificially propping up New York’s struggling agriculture industry. Perhaps most chillingly, he has interjected his government into NYC’s health care system by instituting price controls—a key feature of communism—on pharmaceuticals.
Just a minute…I’m sorry, I must have mixed up my notes. Zohran Mamdani hasn’t done any of those things. Donald Trump has.
It’s a strange time to be a voter who understands what words mean, especially when so many politicians seem to assume we don’t. As a built-in-a-laboratory-perfect example, JD Vance was recently asked to define socialism. The Vice President of the United States admitted that “classically” it’s “about prioritizing workers,” but quickly moved on to say, “I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”
“Everything I don’t like is socialism” is the level of discourse one expects to see on internet comment threads, not behind a podium bearing the seal of the President.
Since we clearly can’t trust the Vice President on the topic of socialism, let’s see what the experts have to say. The Peterson Institute for International Economics is a nonpartisan, independent research organization “dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare.” Last month, they posted a piece to their website titled, “You’re already getting socialism—and Democratic Socialists have nothing to do with it.” In addition to a great general explainer about what socialism actually is, they show that in Trump’s second term the US has dropped sharply in the rankings of countries with the least state control of the economy—a change so abrupt that it would normally only be seen in nations experiencing volatility or war-related crises.
You can see that for the past twenty years, the US economy has ranked as second or third freest in the world, dropping to fourth just once in 2008 due to Bush’s auto industry bailout during the Great Recession. But since Trump took office last year, we’ve plummeted to sixteenth.
In Trump’s second term, according to these nonpartisan economic experts, “the trend is toward greater state ownership or control of the economy—that is, toward socialism. This is occurring under unified Republican control of the US government.”
It’s been jarring as a voter (not to mention as a conservative) to watch this Republican administration enact the most socialist policies since FDR—and at least he had the excuses of the Great Depression and World War II. But to see it in tandem with the constant hyperbolic GOP warnings about communism is farcical.
The RNC official Twitter account tweeted “40 days to stop communism and SAVE AMERICA” the same day Trump rolled out a literal red carpet for the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. As usual when it comes to the powerful leaders of repressive regimes, he lavished praise on Xi, calling him a “great friend” and gushing that he looked “strong, vibrant, and fit.”
There are only three truly communist regimes left on the planet, and the most infamous is that of Kim Jong Un of North Korea. He is the dictator of the world’s most notorious prison-state, which sentenced a 21-year-old American citizen to 15 years’ hard labor for stealing a poster in a North Korean hotel, and returned him to the US 17 months later brain-damaged, in a vegetative state, six days before he died. Earlier this month, Trump said of Kim Jong Un: “I’m about the only person in the entire world that he likes, and I like him.“
“Communism has no place in America,” the White House Twitter account posted, two days after the president banned news outlets from the White House, and one day before the president unveiled Trump TV—his state-run “news” channel. His own personal Pravda, if you will.
“Democrat socialists love to promise free stuff,” the Senate Republicans’ official Twitter account posted last month—a favorite accusation. But Democratic socialists did not tout DOGE refunds or promise $2,000 tariff checks or offer bribes of $5,000 per American if Democrats win Congress. Trump was the source of all that promised “free stuff” (none of which has materialized.)
This isn’t a new strategy for him. During his campaign against Kamala Harris, he told reporters, “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country.”
He keeps telling us his opponents are communists hellbent on destroying our country. But how, specifically, will they accomplish its destruction? Will they blow up the national debt to a staggering $40 trillion? Or illegally use millions of taxpayer dollars to pay for self-adulating propaganda ads? Will they promise ad nauseam not to start another war in the Middle East and then start another war in the Middle East that immediately and predictably backfires, costing American lives and billions of dollars in damage, and jacking up gas prices for a record-breaking length of time? Will they send out a masked, unaccountable secret police force that can harass and kill Americans with impunity? Maybe they’ll oversee the resurgence of a previously eradicated disease? Or willfully defy judicial rulings, making a mockery of our federal system of checks and balances? Perhaps they’ll reveal their true socialist identities by repeatedly siding with a ruthless former KGB agent war criminal who is actively and violently trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. Surely they wouldn’t go so far as to build actual monuments to their own vanity.
GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson recently spoke at length about the imminent danger posed to Americans by communism. “The barbarians are in the gate,” he said.
He is correct.
What we can do:
Trump could not have done all this damage nor led America toward actual socialism without the capitulation of Republicans in Congress. They could have stopped the tariffs, the Iran war, the betrayal of Ukraine, all of it. Americans have grown weary of his lies and of paying—literally—for his stupid decisions. His approval is at an all-time low. And he says to vote like he is on the ballot. Let’s do that.
