Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it.
The president is trying to whip the nation into an anti-communist frenzy. His two speeches over the Fourth of July speeches denounced Marxism-Leninism and presented Trump as the main obstacle standing between America and a dystopian future in which capitalism no longer exists and grim-faced soldiers march down Pennsylvania Avenue on May Day.
Trump is correct that the Democratic Socialists of America, whose leadership is at least half communist, has gained a toehold in the Democratic Party. And Trump’s hatred of communism is consistent with some of his most important beliefs. Communists demonize both billionaires and American nationalism, two things Trump adores, and they pursue a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, whereas he has done the opposite.
On closer inspection, however, Trump has more in common with Communists than his hostile rhetoric lets on. He has probably done more to expand public ownership of the means of production than any president in history. Trump has seized a stake in nearly two dozen private firms so far, for little reason other than the fact that he can. Recently, he wrote on Truth Social that gasoline retailers “must” lower prices or “big problems lie ahead.” And although he has no power to do so, the distinction between public and private has eroded during his presidency to the degree that oil companies, or any large companies, have reason to believe that defying Trump’s wishes could expose them to government retaliation.
Trump’s admiration for Communist political methods is even more pronounced than his respect for its economic system. Trump has praised Communist dictators in terms unlike those used by any American president outside the context of a wartime alliance. In 1990, Trump told Playboy that the Chinese Communist Party “almost blew it” before showing “the power of strength” by crushing demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, thus avoiding the fate of the Soviet regimes that fell the same year.
He has praised Communist dictators—not in the vein of, say, congratulating Cuba for its education policy, but specifically for crushing all opposition. “He’s a brilliant guy,” Trump gushed of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in 2024. “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not.” Trump once claimed that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love,” explaining: “He’s the head of a country. And, I mean, he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Trump’s factual understanding of American history also dovetails closely with that of the far left. He simply disagrees on the moral implications. In his speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday, Trump attacked communists for smearing American prosperity as the fruits of violent expropriation. “As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past,” he said. Yet Trump himself has questioned American innocence. “There are a lot of killers,” he once said, by way of defending Vladimir Putin. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
Trump’s most powerful aide, Stephen Miller, has echoed this line of thinking. He said on CNN in January, “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Enthusiasts for capitalism see prosperity as a positive-sum enterprise generated through cooperation. Trump views it in zero-sum terms, as a thing the strong seize from the weak—a view that informs his constant desire to steal natural resources from smaller countries. That conviction is hardly limited to Marxists. But it’s odd that he would fault Marxists for taking the same blood-stained view of American progress he holds so dearly.
None of this is to suggest that Trump is devoted to communism, or to any theory at all. Trump is sub-ideological, and the instincts that guide his decisions are generally right-wing rather than left-wing. Yet because Trump lacks any theoretical understanding of conservatism, and because Communist states tend to devolve into corrupt oligarchies that diverge sharply from the progressive utopias their idealistic supporters imagine, they seem to hold a certain strange attraction for him.
Unlike his attacks on liberalism, which consist of pure contempt, Trump’s denunciations of communism have an undercurrent of admiration. “Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it is very easy,” he mused recently. “I’ll be honest—I think I’d be the greatest Communist in history. I’d give free rent: Ladies and gentlemen, from now on, you don’t have to pay any rent. From now on, anybody who wants a house, just pick the house you want. Everybody gets free food. Everything is free from this point forward. Everyone’s gonna vote for me.”
Trump accurately captured communism’s main allure—its promise to create a paradise on Earth. But he also described his own political style. He has at times claimed his health-care plan will give people fantastic coverage at lower cost, that he will bring American manufacturing jobs back by the millions, and that he will personally roll back inflation, among other tantalizing promises. Trump once said, “I will give you everything,” a pledge that would have struck even Lenin as a bit messianic.
Unlike the Communists, however, Trump has not bothered to even attempt measures like universal health insurance. He has skipped straight ahead to the coup attempts, show trials, military parades, kitschy personality cult, and endless harangues filled with absurd claims about economic progress.
Many idealists have looked at communism’s history of repressive failure and decided it could go differently if they just give the system one more try. Trump, unburdened by ideals, has looked at the same history and consciously chosen to mimic its worst elements.