The New Republic72%
Donald Trump Has a New—and Stupid and Likely Ineffective—Favorite Word 32%
By Michael Tomasky64%
7/6/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 36 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 14.4% saturation with 150 hits. Analysis detected 1,348 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,043 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 40.9% and a BS Rank of 32% (14,977 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 68.40% of the article peer group.
Donald Trump has a new favorite
word.
He’s been calling
Democrats “communists” ever since a few democratic socialists won some House primaries.
“These are hardcore, godless communists,” he
told
the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month.
“This is the most
serious threat to our country since its existence.” GOP House Speaker Mike
Johnson, the ever-loyal Shih Tzu
on his emperor’s lap, has picked it up as well.
The midterms, he
said
recently, will pit “common sense versus communism.”
Well.
The first question here is
whether Americans even know what communism is (or was) anymore.
There are five
countries in the world that still call themselves communist, but one of those
is China, which at least in economic terms barely counts (the others are Cuba,
North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos).
More than that, it’s getting to be close to 40
years now since the Eastern bloc collapsed.
A person would have to be at least
45 years old to have any memory of all that.
Right now, 57.5 percent of
Americans are
under
that age.
As you’d expect, young people who
weren’t alive to see how cruel, corrupt, and lethargic the Soviet Union was either
don’t know much about communism or don’t see it as such a bad thing.
A
poll
released last week
by the libertarian Cato Institute had some interesting
numbers.
Among all Americans, capitalism was viewed favorably by just 52
percent (that’s the number that would be worrying me if I were a Friedmanesque
free-marketeer; it’s insanely low!).
Socialism was viewed favorably by 37
percent.
And communism got a thumbs up from 21 percent.
That’s overall.
Among respondents
under 30 years old, 38 percent said they had a favorable view of communism.
But
in the Queens of Donald Trump’s youth, calling someone a commie packed a real
wallop, so he clearly thinks it still can.
The word doesn’t actually apply to
any of these people he’s trying to condemn, of course.
As I
noted
last week
, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and even Bernie
Sanders himself aren’t really socialists, in the proper historical sense of the
word.
I don’t hear any of them calling for the state to seize the means of
production, which is the basic historical position of socialism.
They’re social
democrats.
The only one among the crop who has
apparently
said
a few nice things
about actual communism is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the
32-year-old who won the Democratic primary in an upper Manhattan district.
Her
leftism appears to be much more of the campus-radical variety than Mamdani’s
sewer socialism; we’ll see in two years whether the voters of her district are
good with that, or whether she has indeed “grown considerably” since she wrote
those social media posts.
Meanwhile, on the Fourth of July, a
bunch of white supremacists from something called the Patriot Front felt at
home enough in Trump’s Washington to
march
in front of the Capitol
wearing masks, sunglasses, and ballcaps with the
group’s logo boldly displayed, and carrying an array of flags including the
Confederate flag.
(These ghouls undoubtedly went unmasked during the pandemic
to protest supposedly totalitarian public health policies, and now they’re
dressing like totalitarians in an attempt to terrorize regular people.)
And that night, of course, America, or that
portion of it that was interested, listened to another windy address from a
president who once invited avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dine with
him at his house and told the extremist Proud Boys to stand by.
That same president participated
back in May in
Rededicate
250
, a Christian nationalist prayer gathering that, whatever its organizers
said, was clearly intended to pound home the idea that the United States is
supposed to be a Christian nation, which of course it is not.
Democratic
Representative Jared Huffman of California accurately told PBS that the event
“would have the founders rolling in their graves.”
This doesn’t begin to
scratch the surface of right-wing radicalism in this country, most of which
Trump tacitly or sometimes explicitly endorses with rhetoric that’s clearly
fascist.
And beyond Trump himself, many rank-and-file Republicans are shocking
extremists; remember
Nazis
mingling openly
at the 2024 CPAC conference, or
those
leaked text messages
by young Republicans last fall (“I love Hitler”)?
It’s crystal clear in a factual
sense which party is more radical today.
The Democrats could elect two dozen
socialists and they
still
wouldn’t be anywhere near as far left
as the GOP has gone far right.
Oh,
and by the way: For all the media attention socialist candidates get when they
win, it’s still a fact that on balance, mainstream and even centrist Democrats
are winning more primaries this year.
The Cook Political Report
revealed
over the weekend
that in the 22 GOP-controlled congressional districts
where Democrats have held primaries so far, 14 have been won by candidates with
mainstream and centrist backing.
Only four have been won by candidates backed
by the Progressive Caucus.
So in swing districts, Democratic voters are still
mainly choosing the nominees they calculate have a better shot at winning
such a district.
But we’re going to be hearing all
about communists for the next four months.
Trump is obviously trying to make
the midterms a referendum on the Democratic Party and not on him.
History tells
us this rarely works.
It didn’t work for him in 2018, when he was
around
40 percent
in the polls and tried to make the dreaded caravan headed toward
the Rio Grande from Central America the central issue.
And the economy was
comparatively good then, unlike now, when a soaring stock market is benefitting
the rich while most Americans continue to struggle with Trump-juiced inflation.
So Democrats, who tend to freak out
about things, should not freak out about this.
Sure, communism is a scary word,
at least to people of a certain age and ideological bent.
But I’d imagine very few people who
aren’t dyed in the wool MAGA believe the Democratic Party is a bunch of
communists.
I hope that instead of lamely denying it and moving on to gas
prices, they have the guts to fight fire with fire and point out to voters who
the real extremists in this country are.
Speakers
5speakers3.3%attributed speech1,009writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageJared Huffman
1 attributed words2.9% of attributed speech60% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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