LinkedIn on Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Our President, no doubt with the assistance of White House resident white nationalist Stephen Miller, has started telling people that Democrats, particularly those who describe themselves as democratic socialists, are communists. According to Trump, if these communists take charge of our government, it will be the end of the world as we know it.
He’s trying to scare us into letting Republicans keep their majority control in the House and Senate because, if the Democrats take over, it will mean the end of his world as he knows it. It’ll take a while and will be very messy, but Trump will be impeached and he and his sons will be lucky if they don’t serve time.
Trump is not just confused – which he is, always. He’s intentionally lying to us about Democrats being communists. He’s counting on ordinary people and his MAGA base not knowing the difference between the “-isms” and between their dictionary definitions and the reality of their movements.
Our government is a democracy relative to which the ultimate authority is we, the people. One person, one vote. Democracy is our government. The form of our economy is capitalism. Conceptually, we have a more or less free market system in which the means of producing goods and services are owned by the private sector. The government regulates the economy, but only to the extent that the people, via Congress, allow it to do so. American capitalism is far from perfect, but has turned out to be wildly productive.
Unfortunately, meaningful ownership and control over major sectors of our economy have been accomplished by a relatively small number of people. Lately, wealth and its ability to influence our politics have become increasingly and way-overly concentrated among the few who own and control high tech and derivative segments of our economy.
The problem, in other words, is the K-shaped economy that you’ve been hearing about and which was pretty much predicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles when they developed communism in the 1840s. But then Communism, as it turns out, is more of a sound bite than an economic concept that actually works. Communism as Marx and Engles envisioned it doesn’t exist.
Technically, Socialism is a sliding scale alternative to capitalism whereby the government owns or at least controls substantial components of the economy. In fact, real life socialists turn out to be nothing more than people who believe that social services, such as quality health care and education, should be provided by the government – out of tax revenues, preferably collected at higher rates from people and companies that make more money.
Communism – the worst of the great “-isms” as Trump pointed out the other day during his fourth of July speech – is the opposite of capitalism in that, at least theoretically, the government owns the entire economy on behalf of all the people. Invariably, the government that manages this communism is a single person dictatorship.
What Trump is not telling you, because he has no idea, is that communism doesn’t really exist, not even in Russia which is ruled by its Communist Party of the Russian Federation, subject to the whims of President Vladimir Putin, but where a great deal of the economy is privately held and managed. Likewise in China where the country is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, but more specifically by their own fearless leader, President Xi Jinping.
Both of these authoritarian governments feature dictators controlling what are becoming increasingly capitalist economies. Good news that I call my “Last Laugh Hypothesis”… Left well enough alone, the private sectors in Russia and China will eventually take control away from their respective dictators because capitalism does best in a free society, in partnership with democracy. These takeovers are examples of organic regime change that we, the United States, can encourage by virtue of mutually beneficial relationships between our economies. Tariffs and other trade war strategies are not examples of what I’m talking about.
The point is, in reality there is no such thing a communist state. And not even the Democrats who call themselves Democratic Socialists are socialists. In fact, the United States has always been, and still is, a capitalist economy regulated by a democratic government that, heaven knows, has not gone far enough to get big money out of politics and provide for all the people our government is supposed to represent.
No question about it, Democracy is struggling, but Donald Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller aren’t the real problem. Historically, they’ll turn out to be little more than a bump in the road. Our thanks for them helping us identify very specific problems with our system that need fixing.
So forget about Trump, Miller, et al. It’s the bifurcation of capitalism and increasingly concentrated wealth associated with new technologies that we should be worried about. Trump and Miller are just the bulls**t artists du jour that are distracting us from what the fight of our lives is really all about.
The technical, textbook definitions of these “-isms” have little or nothing to do with the meaning of these terms in real life.
And as for Trump trying to frighten us away from voting for Democrats… A guy named McCarthy has been there and done that in the 1940s and 50s. It’s 2026. No one cares about Communism anymore. The Trump/Miller pitch is outdated and on the wrong side of history – and if Putin, Trump’s favorite communist, doesn’t get his tush out of Ukraine soon, our President is going to need a new phone buddy.
-Les Cohen
