The Red Carpet and the Red Scare

Somewhere on the south lawn of the White House, a helicopter landing pad has been rushed toward completion for one very particular guest. The president has been cheerfully open about the reason. It is there to impress Xi Jinping, leader of the most powerful communist country on earth, who arrives for a state visit on Thursday, and he has been slightly wistful that the ballroom will not be ready in time to go with it. Barely a fortnight ago, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, that same president told a roaring crowd that America would become a communist country if the Democrats won in November. I live in a cave in rural Spain, so I am rarely accused of having my finger on the pulse, but even from here I can hear the record skipping.

I should say at the outset that I am not writing this to defend anybody’s tribe. I have spent enough of my life around institutions to distrust anyone who reaches for a single word to do the work of an argument, and “communist” is currently doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting. Much of what follows draws on AP’s reporting, which the Korea Times carried this morning, and I have tried to lean on other sources wherever I could.

The Accusation, Fairly Stated

Let me give the charge its due, because it is not made of nothing. Over the summer, candidates aligned with democratic socialists won Democratic primaries in Michigan, Colorado, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania, and Republicans have seized on it as proof that the opposition has been taken over by radicals. AP notes that they exaggerate much of this, which is the polite way of saying a handful of primary results is not a revolution. Still, a party drifting leftwards is a perfectly legitimate thing for its opponents to campaign against, and Marc Short, formerly Mike Pence’s chief of staff and no liberal, told AP he considers it a very legitimate line of attack. Voters can weigh that on its merits, and that is what elections are for.

The trouble is that the Republican message is being delivered at a difficult moment. The war in Iran is growing less popular, inflation refuses to behave, and the president’s approval ratings have sunk close to historic lows. Nobody needs to be cynical to notice that a big red word is a handy thing to wave when the room is looking the other way.

Physician, Heal Thyself… Or At Least Check the Ownership Structure

Then there is the awkward matter of what the administration has actually been doing with the economy. The White House has secured government stakes in more than thirty companies, among them Westinghouse and Intel. Fortune puts the outlay at roughly $26.7bn across about thirty deals, including a stake of just under ten per cent in Intel, and adds a detail I find rather wonderful: nobody keeps a consolidated ledger, so the holdings sit scattered across at least four agencies. The tally has already crept upwards since then, with a 32nd stake recently taken in a Venezuelan oil venture, and the Council on Foreign Relations questions whether the legal footing is as firm as the enthusiasm. Senator Rand Paul, hardly a Democratic plant, asked on X whether the government owning part of Intel might be a step towards socialism if socialism means the state owning the means of production. Congressman Jim Himes went further at a House hearing and told the Treasury Secretary, with an obvious glint, that he could think of no administration in fifty years quite so communist as this one.

I would be doing you a disservice if I let that pass without the other side, because the other side is interesting. Short does not think these measures come anywhere near turning America into a socialist economy like China’s. What worries him is something more mundane and, frankly, more believable: government picking winners and losers, price controls on things like pharmaceuticals, and the proposed $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every adult, which the president promised in Dallas on the condition that Republicans hold both the House and the Senate. CBS estimates the bill could run to more than a trillion dollars, and some Republicans have been openly unimpressed, which tells you something about where the discomfort actually sits. That is a lot of intervention, as Short argues, and it muddies the contrast the party wants to draw with the Democrats. So we are not really asking whether anyone is a communist. We are asking why the word has come loose from anything it used to describe.

The Strongman Weather System

The bit of the story I find most human is the history. In 2015, with Barack Obama about to host Xi, Trump scoffed at the pomp and suggested the president should just take the visitors to McDonald’s and get back to negotiating. By 2018 he was marvelling at Xi’s position, telling donors at Mar-a-Lago that Xi was now president for life and adding that maybe America should give that a shot someday. In fairness, that was a jokey, closed-door fundraiser, the tape only surfaced because CNN obtained a recording, and the White House said afterwards that he supports term limits at home. What it does show is the warmth, which has been remarkably consistent for a man who now calls the other party communists.

In July, the president broke from the pattern, at least briefly. In a primetime address on the sixteenth, he declassified a trove of documents which he said showed Chinese interference in American elections and vulnerabilities in the voting system. Reactions were sharply divided. CNN’s review found that the papers largely describe weaknesses known for years, and that none of it supports the idea that any past result was changed by foreign meddling. The White House replied that the release contained substantial intelligence never made public before, including material on China compromising American voter data at scale. You can read both and decide for yourself who has the better of it. What struck AP, and me, was what came next: within days the president was saying it had all happened a long time ago and that China was perhaps a bit different now, and he never called for penalties against Beijing.

Marc Selverstone, of the University of Virginia’s Miller Centre, offered the most elegant explanation in the whole AP piece. Trump’s fascination is with strongmen as a category, communist and non-communist alike, and the list includes Kim Jong Un, Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin. It is not an ideology at all, in other words. It is a taste, and a consistent one, which makes it far more predictable than any of the rhetoric wrapped around it. Ali Wyne, of the International Crisis Group, made the same point in a drier register: the president turned his anger on the media and the Democrats rather than on Xi, and let it be known that the relationship was still on track.

What the Word Used to Mean

I grew up a service child in the Cold War, in an age when communism was not a slogan but a fence with towers on it, and the people on the other side of that fence were a matter of daily professional concern to the adults around me. I later spent a career in RAF Police and security management where you learned to be exact about threats, because vagueness gets people hurt. Perhaps that is why this sort of language grates on me. When “communist” can mean a candidate who won a primary, a policy that irritates a libertarian, and a head of state whose landing pad is being built with love, then the word has stopped identifying a danger and started identifying a mood.

Out here in the hills, with my own small band of neighbours, we get on by sharing the well, mending each other’s roofs and arguing about tomatoes, and nobody has ever called it an ideology. It is just how people cope when the big systems are too far away to help. I suspect that most voters, on whichever side, are living the same quiet pragmatism and would like their politicians to stop shouting labels across their heads. I do not have a tidy conclusion for you. The helipad will be finished, the carpet will be rolled out, and the midterms will arrive on schedule, and we will find out then whether anyone in the audience was still listening to the words, or had long since started watching the hands.

Until Next Time