Vote Democratic to Fight Socialism

Republicans have made the stakes for Election Day clear. Former Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said the midterms are “a choice between communism and common sense.” According to Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (currently up for reelection), this Tuesday is “communism versus democracy, and big government versus the free market. It could not be higher stakes.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson believes the war in Iran is not America’s only frontline: “We’re fighting communism on our own shores, and we’re fighting evil terrorists and tyrants around the world.” The President himself warned, “It's going to be a communist country if they win” at the GOP convention this September. 

These calls are coming from inside the house.

Donald Trump has more in common with many communist rulers than any U.S. President in modern history. No other President since World War Two has taken as much of a personal interest in dictating the American economy on everything from trade to industry to energy production to Hollywood (with 100% tariffs on foreign films). The aesthetics match: for two years Washington, D.C., has been subjected to towering banners of Dear Leader’s portrait, tanks and APCs rolling down Constitution Avenue (both on parade and on patrol), and the President’s birthday celebrated with televised bloodsport on the White House lawn. Finally, the extent of corruption, brownnosing, and inside dealing that has become table stakes for anybody engaging with the Trump administration is enough to make Soviet apparatchiks blush. 

And of course, there is the fondness for the color red. 

I am not the first one to notice the Republican hypocrisy when it comes to fighting socialism. Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute—who I affectionately refer to as “one of the last living libertarians on Earth”—has been on this Twitter beat for a while. What I have not seen before, and hope to lay out here, is a comprehensive case that the current Republican Party is clearly the biggest socialist threat facing America. 

If, like me, you are not a socialist and do not want the United States to be a socialist country, then your decision on Tuesday should be obvious. Vote Democratic to stop socialism.

Socialism is when the government does things

Ask a dozen socialists for a definition of socialism and you’ll get a baker’s dozen answers. Include some non-socialists in your survey and the number grows exponentially. Already I know there are probably some readers upset about the fact I implicitly conflated communism and socialism in the paragraphs above. I am not arguing that Donald Trump is a Manifesto-carrying Marxist-Leninist—mostly because he is not intellectually capable of having anything resembling a coherent political ideology. What Trump represents is something like a distillation of socialism’s failures in practice without any of the theory.

Trump is hardly the only politician to practice communism without “communism.” In 2009 all mentions of “communism” were removed from the North Korean constitution. This follows a multi-generational practice of the Kim lineage trying to distance their Juche ideology from the legacy of Marx and Lenin. In “The Political Philosophy of Juche,” Grace Lee summarizes the core principles of North Korean Juche, some of which might sound familiar:

“[Kim Il Sung] declared that ‘…the Government of the Republic will implement with all consistency the line of independence, self-sustenance, and self-defense to consolidate the political independence of the country … build up more solidly the foundations of an independent national economy capable of insuring the complete unification, independence, and prosperity of our nation … increasing the country’s defense capabilities, so as to safeguard the security of the fatherland reliably by our own force.’”

“In practice, this political stance has caused North Korea to truly become a hermit kingdom because of the huge stigma juche places upon cooperation with outside powers.”

“According to Kim Jong Il, ‘building an independent national economy means building an economy which is free from dependence on others and which stands on its own feet.’”

There are nuances of course—Kim Il Sung acknowledged the importance of mutual cooperation between socialist nations—but the main pillars of (1) independence over cooperation and (2) economic autarky certainly rhyme with Trump’s worldview. 

Juche becomes an even better comparison for Trump’s second term when looking beyond its stated principles. The defining characteristic of Juche ideology is how inseparable it is from the personality cult surrounding the Kim leaders themselves. The official name is Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism, as written in the country’s constitution—or at least it was until earlier this year, when references to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were removed in lieu of praising Kim Jong Un. Trump’s name isn’t in the Constitution, but his cult of personality has been written into many official government programs: from a fighter jet named the F-47 to the notional "Trump class battleships" to “Trump Accounts” for American children (and maybe soon for all Americans). 

Trump may not be the first communist President by strict definitions, but he is the closest thing any of us have seen before. 

Socialist economics

One of the most surprising divergences of Trump from the GOP of yesteryear is his appetite for political intervention in the free market. Even more surprising is the extent to which he has remade the GOP in his image. Trump has pushed every button and pulled every lever within his reach—and some that are supposed to be beyond his reach—in an effort to steer the American economy as he sees fit. Trump is singularly driven by a bizarre set of economic goals and an equally bizarre set of economic misconceptions. Whenever economics in practice conflicts with his theory of how things ought to be, his first reaction is to deny reality or blame it on sabotage—quite socialist indeed. And the Party—the Grand Old Party—follows along.

The foundation of Trump’s economic policy has been levying hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs in a supposed effort to boost American manufacturing and promote self-sufficiency (despite basic economics predicting the opposite). In practice, Trump regularly wields tariffs as a weapon for extracting favors and punishing his opponents—Brazil was hit with 50% tariffs for their treatment of fellow failed coup leader Jair Bolsonaro. For as much as Republicans have smugly joked about “socialist economics,” Trump is setting new lows in economic literacy. He thinks a trade deficit is a subsidy the US pays to other governments. The original Liberation Day tariff formula was just dividing a country’s trade deficit by its imports.

Trump’s tariffs are motivated by his obsession with a caricature of American industry, and this obsession influences energy policy as well. The President’s vision of industry is that of a child: big cars made by big machines in big factories with big smokestacks. Of course these big, beautiful factories shouldn’t be powered with weak, girly, liberal electricity from solar and wind plants; it must be powered with strong, manly, conservative electricity from fossil fuels. On one hand the White House is offering billions of dollars for energy companies to stop building wind farms, and on the other it is paying to build the first new coal plants in over a decade, despite coal power now being substantially more expensive per kilowatt-hour than wind power.

Going out of one’s way to pay a higher cost for particular types of electricity for ideological reasons used to be something Republicans called socialism—when Democrats supported clean energy. How the tables have turned. 

Trump is no stranger to every libertarian’s favorite example of bad socialist economics: price controls. When the three-day special military operation in Iran lasted a bit longer than three days, the President urged petroleum companies to keep gas to $2.50 a gallon and ordered the Department of Justice to investigate oil companies for not lowering their prices. He then sponsored Freedom Fuel, a line of gas stations promising to sell gas at below market prices ($3.47 to be precise)—and in typical socialist fashion it was probably a scam using stolen gas. Maybe President Trump kidnapped Maduro so he could ask for economic advice personally. 

Completely without precedent is the spree of national shares the federal government has taken in private firms over the past two years: over thirty deals worth a combined $18 billion. 

Figure 2 doesn’t cover the full extent of government ownership under Trump. Some key deals have been made without direct investment, like the 5% stake Trump took in Lithium Americas. Some have no easily measurable cash value, like the deal with Anduril for 40% of its Baltimore submarine shipyard. Some are “golden share” deals where the government gets veto power without a financial stake. Nvidia and AMD struck a deal to allow the export of highly advanced computer chips to China, so long as they pay a 15% commission to Uncle Sam. Trump has even seized the means of production in other socialist countries by taking a 35% stake in a Venezuelan oil company. If you listen closely you can almost hear The Internationale playing.  

And I don’t think I need to explain the irony of accusing your opponents of being communists and then promising to send everybody a government check for $5,000 if your party wins the election. 

Like many socialist regimes, the Trump administration often lies about economic figures, cries sabotage, or just blathers nonsense when things aren’t going their way. According to Trump, the United States is making trillions of dollars from tariffs and will soon pay down the national debt. Sure. The President regularly lies about gas prices, claiming absurdly low prices compared to the actual average. When a jobs report looked bad last August, Trump publicly fired the BLS commissioner, accusing her of being a “Biden Political Appointee.” 

A tried and true strategy for failing socialist economies is to simply stop publishing economic statistics. When the 1937 census counted fewer people than Stalin wanted (due to famine), he had the results annulled and the head of the census bureau shot. Venezuela’s central bank did not publish any inflation data from 2015–2019. North Korea doesn’t publish any numbers on anything at all; the best data on the North comes from the Bank of Korea, in the South, which makes yearly estimations. 

Trump has learned from his fellow comrades and has silenced many of our country’s bravest statisticians. Soon after cutting billions of dollars from SNAP—thus causing millions to lose food assistance, including 1.5 million children—the USDA announced the termination of Household Food Security Reports, the official US measure of food insecurity. The official press release is so Orwellian it sounds like parody:

“These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger. For 30 years, this study—initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments—failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”

Socialist aesthetics

The similarities do not end with Trump’s taste for the socialist economic toolkit. The President’s obsession with aesthetics and public displays of personal worship feel more at home in Pyongyang than Washington. In his first year back in office, the President hosted a military parade to celebrate his birthday (sponsored by Palantir and Coinbase), rolling tanks down Constitution Avenue. This year he celebrated with a UFC fight on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and White House lawn—one that ended with an athlete hurling slurs at former First Lady Michelle Obama to millions of spectators on pay-per-view. Dennis Rodman singing Kim Jong Un a happy birthday in 2014 seems humble in comparison. 

Trump has tried to remake the nation’s capital in his image, desecrating or destroying many of its treasures in the process. The National Mall reflecting pool was closed all summer after his failed attempts at renovation and remains closed to this day. Hundreds of trees were cut down in the East Potomac golf course in violation of a court order last month. The entire East Wing of the White House has been levelled to make way for a ballroom atop a military complex. The communist parallels continue: inspired by the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, Nicolae Ceaușescu had large parts of downtown Bucharest bulldozed to make room for his presidential palace. 

It’s unsettling how quickly I’ve adapted to the sight of towering banners displaying the President’s face on the side of federal buildings downtown. Dear Leader’s unhappy glare looming over the streets of D.C. from the Department of Justice headquarters as armed soldiers patrol the Metro should be something out of a cheesy ’80s movie, not a real life visit to the Smithsonian. 

Speaking of the Smithsonian, Trump loves rewriting history as much as any socialist leader. The American History Museum removed mention of Trump from the impeachment section of its Presidents exhibit. The White House’s hallway of presidential portraits is now an exercise in grotesque propaganda. “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President of American History,” reads the plaque sitting beneath a photo of an autopen. Barack Hussein Obama sits between George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump and lists some of his accomplishments as passing “the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act” and presiding “over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History.”

Trump and Kim Jong Il would likely bond over their mutual fixation on the cultural arts. Soon after inauguration, Trump turned his sights to a far more important election—becoming the chair of the Kennedy Center board. Since then the White House has been entrenched in a prolonged and bloody legal battle regarding the theater, its renovations, and its naming rights. This saga came to an absurd climax this summer when a judge ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the facility’s facade. Hundreds of D.C. residents formed a crowd to watch the vandalism get cleaned firsthand, but out of spite the President ordered construction crews to put up a tarp to deny them the spectacle. Before he was Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Il was a big cinephile and applied his passion as director of the movies department in the DPRK’s Propaganda and Agitation Division—going as far as to kidnap a South Korean director and actress to perform for him. Despite his frustrations, Trump hasn’t kidnapped any artists for cancelling performances at the Kennedy Center. But we’ve still got two years to go.

Naming things after leaders is by no means unique to communist countries—our nation’s capital is Washington, D.C. after all—but typically we name things for former leaders, not current ones. We now have Trump-class battleships, the F-47 fighter jet (named for Trump being the 47th president), and the Donald J. Trump International Airport (formerly Palm Beach International Airport)—though he has not yet gone so far as to name months of the calendar after himself, as Soviet communist and president-for-life of Turkmenistan Saparmurat Niyazov did. Trump’s name and face are being added to facets of government bureaucracy left and right. His portrait can be found on gold coins from the US Mint and passports issued by the State Department. Don’t forget about “Trump Accounts,” which are quite literally a vehicle for redistribution of capital (at the President and his cronies’ discretion, of course).

Throughout this second administration, the President has been planning to build an arch monument: “The one that people know mostly is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, and we’re going to top it by, I think, a lot,” insisting that the arch be taller than the French Arc’s 164 feet. You know who else wanted a big national arch monument built to be taller than Paris’ Arc de Triomphe? Kim Il Sung, for his 70th birthday. 

Socialist government

The scale, scope, and shamelessness of corruption in the Trump administration is beyond belief. Many have tried the daunting task of documenting it all, and I do not envy the task. Unfortunately, people have learned to play Trump’s game, and D.C. politics has adapted to open bribery and brownnosing as winning strategies. 

Almost every economics professor I’ve had has instilled in me the idea that markets always exist. Socialist countries merely shift markets from open, price-based ones to closed, influence-based ones. Trump has transformed the White House into an unholy combination of the two, where powerful insiders jockey against each other to gain the President’s favor for the sake of profit. 

Seeking relief from the President’s tariff regime, many companies decided to go straight to the source. After Switzerland was hit with 39% tariffs, Swiss business leaders, including the CEO of Rolex, visited the White House and presented the President with gifts including a gold bar engraved with the numbers 45 and 47. Within weeks, tariffs on Switzerland were lowered to 15%. On Aug 6, 2025, then-CEO of Apple Tim Cook took a trip to the White House to deliver a 24-karat gold plaque with his name on it. Apple was then specifically exempted from tariffs on semiconductors. Pfizer agreed to sign-on to the President’s “TrumpRx” drug pricing plan in exchange for a three-year grace period on pharmaceutical tariffs.

Leveraging personal favors out of the President extends beyond economics. The President has created what CBS News described as a “booming pardon economy” where criminals can buy their way out of prison by sucking up to Trump. Seventy percent of pardon applications during the second Trump administration have bypassed the Department of Justice’s pardon office, instead being sent straight to the Oval Office. Criminals and fraudsters are well aware of this economy and consider making a public pivot to MAGA politics in the hopes of winning a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sam Bankman-Fried, sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison on fraud charges, literally wrote down “Go on Tucker Carlsen, come out as a republican” in his strategy notes. Nicki Minaj’s brother was sentenced to twenty-five years for child rape and her husband was convicted for the attempted rape of a 16-year-old girl. Now she might be in the running to be Press Secretary. Pedocon theory is a theory like gravity. 

Political appointees and federal employees are no longer selected for merit or competence, but party loyalty. Job applicants for intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement were asked about their opinions on the January 6th insurrection. Questions included whether the insurrection was an “inside job” and whether the 2020 election was stolen. The Washington Sun reports that the State Department has been asking diplomats up for promotion about their voting record and campaign donation history, despite federal law prohibiting personnel decisions being made on the basis of political affiliation. Key institutional figures outside the federal hiring pipeline are subject to similar loyalty tests. During a Senate hearing before his appointment as chair of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh refused to answer whether or not Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Newly appointed federal judges have done the same in their own Senate hearings. 

Most pathetic is how far powerful companies and CEOs have been willing to bend over backwards to appease Trump’s most petty and pointless displays. The word “Orwellian” is overused, but I’m not sure how else to describe both Apple and Google Maps renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario according to the President’s whims. Even the business titans of the trillion-dollar AI industry are eager to prostrate themselves before Trump and indulge his doubleplusgood vocabulary. A few weeks ago, out of seemingly nowhere, the President started musing about the term artificial intelligence. After running a poll on social media, he declared that from now on the United States would not recognize the terms artificial intelligence or AI—instead it would be SI, for Super Intelligence. A few days ago he declared the term AI will be banned from use in government documentation and demanded to know why the Wall Street Journal had not updated their terminology. 

For all the hell that was raised about overly “woke” acronyms like LGBTQIA+ or pointless conjugations like Latinx, no Democratic president ever mandated those terms by executive decree. Just take a moment to imagine the reaction if one morning Joe Biden or Barack Obama declared that oil would be officially renamed to BETroleum. Without missing a beat, tech leaders like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang started speaking and tweeting about SI. At some point I have to ask what the point of a hundred billion dollars is if you cannot afford to tell the President to knock it off with his bullshit every once in a while.

Better Dem than red

Some people, myself included, have pointed out how the Republican Party ringing the socialism alarm for decades has helped to enable some genuine socialists to form a beachhead in Democratic politics. Many young Americans on the left figured if socialism is when the government does stuff, and they want the government to do more stuff, then perhaps they are socialists. 

What is underdiscussed is the extent to which Republicans have become the very socialists they claim to oppose. A recent survey from the Economic Innovation Group found that current Republicans are actually more likely to support the government taking an ownership stake in American companies than Democrats: 29% of Republicans agreed that “the U.S. government should be able to take an ownership stake in American companies in key industries,” compared to just 22% of Democrats. You can argue on the margins about public healthcare or unionization being socialist, but I struggle to think of anything more clearly socialist than literally seizing the means of production. 

The Republican Party’s days as defenders of the free market are over, and it’s not just about Trump’s tariffs. While many nativists still cling to incorrect and fallacious arguments that tariffs are good for the economy or that immigrants are bad, some have begun to bite the bullet and argue that economic costs are worth paying for the sake of the nation. At a 2024 campaign rally, Vice President Vance remarked that “a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” The facade of Republican support for high-skilled legal immigration has given way to the racism that was always lurking underneath. Figures like Chris Rufo are bold enough to cohost podcasts titled “The Indian Question,” a clear reference to the Jewish Question, which was followed by Hitler’s Final Solution. 

If only we had a word to describe that nationalist brand of socialism.

Republicans are right about the stakes for these midterms. This is indeed a battle for America’s future. Free markets, rule of law, freedom of speech, the American dream, and so much more are on the ballot. If the socialists win, it will be disastrous for us all. That is why true American patriots across the country must show up this Tuesday to vote for Democrats.

Featured image is President Trump Meets with Chairman Kim Jong Un, June 30, 2019 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead).