Suddenly, Communists Are Everywhere
· The Atlantic
Karl Marx wrote that political actors often borrow the language and symbols of earlier struggles to wage their own battles. So perhaps he would have been unsurprised to hear the Trump administration resurrect the political rhetoric of the Cold War fight against Marxism.
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President Trump, at Wheeler High School in the Atlanta suburbs earlier this summer, mentioned communism or communist 15 times, starting less than a minute into his hour-plus speech: “Communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history—including even World War I and World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11,” he claimed. “I think it’s the greatest threat that I’ve ever seen to our country.”
Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened political leaders, counterterrorism professionals, and law-enforcement officers from 66 countries for what the State Department billed as an extraordinary gathering aimed at confronting “a transnational threat.” From a podium flanked by world flags, Rubio spoke of the need to combat the far left around the world. “This is a distinctive and unique evil,” he said. “They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same.” The State Department even has a culprit in mind, last week releasing a 100-page report that characterized Cuba as “posing a unique threat” to American security.
Never mind that the island nation of 11 million people lost its chief sponsor with the Soviet Union’s collapse and is so economically strapped that the regime rations electricity and gas. The official line of the U.S. government is that Havana has backed “left-wing terrorism” inside the United States—including “violent BLM militants” and “Antifa terror cells”—and provides a refuge for communism in the Western Hemisphere. “The Cuba that they’re describing, going back to the ’60s and onward, doesn’t exist anymore,” Ted Piccone, a senior foreign-policy adviser for the Clinton administration, told us. “I think they’re just fighting an old ghost in old battles.”
From the standpoint of the White House, however, reviving communism as a boogeyman is a way to tie together two very current objectives. On the home front, experts told us that the vilification of Communists could be an attempt to shift the focus away from painful pocketbook issues such as higher gas prices and inflation, and to paint Democrats, and democratic socialists in particular, as anti-American ahead of the midterms. Overseas, fighting Marxism, especially in Latin America, injects principle into the administration’s desire for dominance in the Western Hemisphere, which so far has led to the removal of a leftist dictator in Venezuela and laid the groundwork for the overthrow of the regime in Havana. Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesperson, said in a statement that the United States will “not ignore the threat posed by a regime 90 miles off our coast intent on undermining the national security of the American people through espionage and the spread of its failed, insidious ideology.”
Others see less ideological combat, more exercise of American muscle. “The idea is to get rid of any government in the Western Hemisphere that’s not willing to toe the line,” William LeoGrande, a former dean of American University’s School of Public Affairs, told us. “It started with Venezuela, obviously, and now turned to Cuba.” He added, “If I was Daniel Ortega,” Nicaragua’s autocratic ruler, “I might be a little worried that I’d be next.”
U.S. voters may regard the revival of the “Reds under the bed” scare as a desperate attempt by an unpopular president to bolster his party’s election chances. Others may see Rubio using an outdated threat as cover to achieve greater American influence. But the push is already having an effect elsewhere, as other Latin American governments paint pro-democracy protesters as Marxists intent on undermining public order to justify crackdowns.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly described Democrats as socialists or Communists, regardless of how moderate those Democrats’ positions were. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he referred to Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, as just a “socialist.” And the October before the 2018 midterms, Trump wrote in an op-ed in USA Today that the “new Democrats are radical socialists” who want to introduce “open-borders socialism,” and he warned that their economic policies were modeled after the socialist policies of Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. He never used the word communism, though, and despite his warnings, Democrats took control of the House. By 2024, Trump was calling his rival for the presidency “Comrade Kamala.”
This June, the president again started describing Democratic candidates as “Communist.” Speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s policy conference, Trump declared: “It’s becoming a communist party. These are not social Democrats; these are hard-core, godless Communists.” A Reuters analysis revealed that Trump invoked the word communism more than 80 times in the two weeks leading up to July 8.
The shift followed primary victories by democratic-socialist candidates in New York, California, and Colorado, as well as last year’s sweeping victory by the DSA standard-bearer Zohran Mamdani to become mayor of New York City. Polls currently suggest that the Democrats could win one or both chambers of Congress in November.
“The Democrats’ full-blown embrace of socialism and communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” the White House spokesperson Allison Schuster told us in a statement. “President Trump will never allow America to become a socialist or communist country.”
Others in the administration, including Vice President Vance, have echoed Trump’s rhetoric. But no member has been more fervent in his public disdain for Communists than Rubio. His anti-communism is deeply personal. The secretary, the first of Latino descent to serve in the role, is the grandson of Cuban exiles who fled the island as Fidel Castro took power, settling in South Florida, where Rubio grew up. “Marco’s talked about this a lot—growing up in a Cuban American community, you hear the stories: firsthand accounts about repression; about not having basic freedoms; about watching an economy just collapse under that system,” Cesar Conda, Rubio’s former Senate chief of staff, told us. “That stuff shapes you. I think it shaped him, from a really young age.”
That hatred of communism became a constant reprise through Rubio’s career in local and state politics in Florida, in the U.S. Senate, and in the Trump administration. “It’s not complicated once you understand where he comes from,” Conda said. “It’s personal, it’s family, it’s ideology, and yeah, there’s a strategic piece to it, too. But the family history—that’s the big one. That’s really where it starts.”
Rubio does not hold all Communists to the same standard. Conda recalled that Rubio, while a Senator in 2014, “said he’d never wanted to set foot in Communist China” because of his contempt for communist regimes. His criticism of China’s human-rights record put Rubio on a Chinese sanctions list in 2020—twice. (Rubio’s trip to Beijing with Trump this year was his first.) But Rubio told reporters late last month that China, still home to the world’s largest and most successful Communist Party, would remain a diplomatic partner to the United States. “These are the two most powerful economies in the world, two large militaries, two nuclear powers,” Rubio said. “We have to have a relationship with China, and we want it to be as positive as it possibly can be.” (Imagine President Ronald Reagan saying the same about the Soviets.) Rubio has paid relatively little attention to the other nominally left-wing regime in North Korea.
Instead, the administration has depicted Western Europe as a new hotbed of Marxism. The State Department, in recent months, placed four European left-wing groups, including the Germany-based Antifa Ost, on blacklists designed to isolate terrorists, choke off their funding, and protect national security. Advocates of this approach point to an uptick in left-wing political violence. The Trump administration has claimed that left-wing extremists and anarchists are responsible for most terror attacks in Europe, pointing to data from 2022. American officials also emphasize the more than 40 percent increase in violence attributed to left-wing extremism in Germany.
Other data tell a different story. In 2025, the European Union member states recorded 11 completed attacks by left-wing extremist groups. But only about a third of completed terror attacks in the EU have been attributed to left-wing actors over the past three years, according to Europol, the EU’s law-enforcement agency. (The highest number of completed attacks was attributed to ethno-nationalist and separatist groups—primarily in France—while jihadist groups were responsible for the largest number of foiled or failed attacks.) In Germany, right-wing extremists continue to account for the largest share of political violence. The German far-right party AfD, which the government deemed an extremist group last year, leads nationwide popularity polls. Farther east, several states that were once Soviet satellites have swung right. Many European countries that used to be under communist control now appear to be on Trump’s side.
[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump]
In the Trump administration’s ideal world, Cuba might go the way of Venezuela, where military intervention and Maduro’s seizure forced the country into close partnership with the United States. The administration has been piling pressure on Havana to expand its private sector (which would allow greater access for U.S. companies) and to make changes at the top, with the threat of military action if the regime doesn’t yield. The prolonged war with Iran has complicated that campaign, and produced skepticism even among the president’s supporters of the wisdom of foreign intervention. “Some sort of military adventure in Cuba on the heels of a very unpopular war in Iran would be political suicide,” Christopher Hernandez-Roy, the acting director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us. “So they have to point to some other things, such as painting Cuba as a geopolitical adversary that’s spreading communism around the world, which is kind of silly.”
But it’s a strategy that other leaders have used successfully. Argentinian President Javier Milei, a Trump ally, has described much of his domestic opposition not as fellow citizens with competing ideas but as agents of an ideological enemy. Labor organizers, feminist movements, and left-leaning political groups have all been labeled “Communists” or willing accomplices to a communist project. What the targets believe is almost irrelevant. Once political opponents are cast as part of a larger ideological conspiracy, Milei and his allies can treat them as a threat to democratic life. Milei introduced, then expanded, a sweeping campaign to limit labor strikes, street demonstrations, and other forms of organized dissent. Federal security forces last year moved aggressively to clear picket lines, disperse demonstrations, and prevent protesters from blocking roads after the passage of economic reforms. Protest organizers now face the prospect of criminal investigations, financial penalties, and state surveillance.
Trump’s labeling of his political opponents as “Communists” may be a transparent ploy. And Rubio’s portrayal of Havana as a principal exporter of left-wing terror may be impossible to reconcile with the reality of modern-day Cuba. But the administration’s anti-communist vocabulary has nonetheless been embraced by governments far beyond Washington. The result isn’t a new Cold War. It’s the spread of an old political lexicon that can be used to cast political opponents as representatives of a specter that most people thought had long been dispatched.