Donald Trump stood at Mount Rushmore on July 3rd, two days before America's 250th birthday, and promised a crowd that he would 'vanquish communists quickly' and 'send them into exile.' Not metaphorically. Not as a joke. The sitting president of the United States is running a red scare in the year 2026, and his own State Department just published a 100-page report to back him up.
The Speech, the Report, and the Guy Who Learned from McCarthy's Fixer
At Mount Rushmore, Trump declared 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.' He said this in front of four presidents carved into a mountain. He said newcomers to America were embracing 'ideas totally opposed to our way of life.' He said he'd send them into exile.
Then, this week, the State Department published a 100-page document titled 'Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism,' according to The Guardian. The report claims the 'highest reaches' of the US government have been 'infiltrated' by Cuban communist networks, and ties those networks to 'leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.' One hundred pages. They put that together.
Here is the thing you need to understand about where Trump is coming from on this. Roy Cohn, the man who served as chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy during the original red scare witch-hunts, who personally masterminded the federal prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg before they were executed for treason, later became Donald Trump's personal mentor as he climbed the New York real estate world. That's not an editorial flourish. That's just what happened. The Guardian confirmed it. The throughline is direct.
What Actually Triggered This, Because There Is a Proximate Cause
Trump didn't wake up one morning and decide to resurrect the ghost of Joe McCarthy for no reason. There's a political context here, and it matters.
Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the New York mayoral race. A succession of candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America have since won Democratic primaries, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, who knocked out veteran New York representative Adriano Espaillat in June. The DSA's brand is having a moment, and Trump's team clearly thinks that's something they can work with.
Chevalier handed them some ammunition herself. The Guardian reports she's facing scrutiny over a now-deleted Twitter account that praised Marxist ideology and figures including Vladimir Lenin. Look, praising Lenin online is a choice that tends to complicate your general-election positioning. That is a fair criticism. But 'this candidate tweeted some bad things' is a genuinely different argument than 'Cuba has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government,' and the Trump administration is blurring that line with all the subtlety of a foghorn.
What Democrats and Historians Are Actually Saying
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member and New York representative, called the communist label 'very silly' and framed it as misdirection. 'They want to call it communist because they don't want you to know that Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada, everybody else has it better than us,' she told reporters, according to The Guardian. Fair point, and she made it without anyone sending it to the Hague.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian who studies fascism, put it more directly on X: 'Not subtle: new party line is to associate Communists with every crime, every offense. Create a sense of Communist threat to justify a rightwing crackdown. Old playbook used with coups and Fascist takeovers.' She called it an old playbook. She is correct that it is an old playbook.
The DSA's own spokesperson offered this gem to The Guardian: 'It's concerning but not surprising that Donald Trump would like to send his opponents into exile, because it's increasingly evident our ideas win with the American people: socialism beats fascism.' That is a remarkably clean quote for a press operation.
Here's Where It Gets Complicated
Before you fully dismiss this as pure McCarthyite theater with nothing underneath it, there is a serious scholar who complicates the picture. Harvey Klehr, an emeritus professor at Emory University and one of the country's leading experts on American communism, told The Guardian that 'the communist issue is not entirely a bugaboo' and that the DSA has a 'very significant communist component.'
His argument is structural. The DSA was founded in 1982 with a constitution that explicitly excluded members of Soviet-style communist parties. That provision, Klehr says, was later repealed, triggering an influx of more radical members. He compared it to the Trotskyite Militant tendency's 'entryist' infiltration of Britain's Labour party in the early 1980s, which dragged the party left and contributed to catastrophic election losses under Margaret Thatcher. That's a real historical parallel and it deserves engagement, not dismissal.
So to be precise about what is happening here: there is a legitimate debate to be had about the ideological composition of the DSA and what it means for the Democratic Party's electoral future. That debate is real. And then there is a 100-page State Department report claiming Cuba has infiltrated the US government and a president vowing to exile his political opponents. Those are not the same thing. One is political science. The other is something else entirely.
What 'Send Them Into Exile' Actually Means
Let's not breeze past that phrase. The president of the United States, at a major public address, vowed to send people with political views he disagrees with 'into exile.' That is not a campaign slogan. That is a thing authoritarian governments do to their opponents.
The Guardian notes Trump grew up during the original red scare, when anti-communist hysteria was the background noise of American childhood. McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954 and the paranoia faded. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. And now, 35 years after that, with Roy Cohn's former mentee in the White House, we are apparently doing another lap.
The question The Guardian asks is whether this language resonates beyond the MAGA base. That is the right question. The answer probably depends on whether democratic socialists keep winning primaries and whether the political press decides to cover the policy differences or just the vibes war. History suggests the vibes war is more telegenic.
The Dingo Take
Here is what is genuinely alarming about this moment, separate from the dark comedy of it. Trump is not just using 'communist' as a slur for cable news clips. His administration has produced formal government documents, 100 pages worth, making sweeping infiltration claims. He has made public vows to exile political opponents. These are not throwaway rally lines. These are policy postures, and they have a historical pattern that historians who study authoritarianism are actively flagging in real time. When a professor whose career is built on studying actual communist infiltration of American institutions says the charges are partly exaggerated, and a fascism historian says the playbook is classic pre-coup behavior, maybe both of them are worth listening to at the same time.
The DSA's rise is real. Some of its members have bad online histories. Zohran Mamdani won New York. These are facts that Democratic Party strategists should be wrestling with hard right now, because there are legitimate electoral questions buried under all of this noise. But 'democratic socialists are winning primaries' and 'Cuba controls the US government and we must exile the opposition' are separated by approximately the entire distance between democracy and something that does not have a great historical track record.
Trump learned politics from a man who helped send two people to the electric chair during the last red scare. He's now running the country. Nobody should be surprised that the red scare is back. The surprise should be that we let it get this far before anyone started treating it with the seriousness it deserves.
