ByDOUGLAS BLOOMFIELDJULY 8, 2026 17:00With fear of a blue wave in November that could wash away Republican control of Congress, an increasingly desperate GOP Party is reverting to its favorite old battle cry: The commies are coming.Leading the new red scare is President Donald Trump, who traces his roots in that swamp to the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.Instead of using the July 4 celebration to unify and inspire the nation, Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore to be the great national divider.Instead of patriotism, he spewed partisanship. Along with reciting his familiar personal grievances, he sought to ignite a new wave of anti-communist hysteria.In speeches and tweets over the holiday weekend, Trump invoked one of the ugliest periods in American history.US Senate floor (credit: FLICKR)'Mortal threat to American liberty'“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life,” the president cried. Communism is a “mortal threat to American liberty.”Who are these communists? Immigrants. Democratic Socialists. Progressives. Liberals. Democrats. Just about anyone he hates.Democrats, Trump declared, are “hardcore godless communists,” unlike the God-fearing Christian Republicans attending the Faith & Freedom Coalition in Washington last month. “We have to stop this, this horrible thread of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism,” he told them.This is nothing new for the hater-in-chief. Trump is a protégé of one of the great red baiters of American history, Roy Cohn, himself the brain behind McCarthy.Trump may accuse others of McCarthyism, but he is more the practitioner than the victim. Cohn, who was McCarthy’s closest advisor, was not only Trump’s mentor but also his personal lawyer.Historian Jon Meacham wrote, “Both McCarthy and Trump were opportunists who used whatever issue might be at hand to dominate the news and seek power.”Cohn’s posthumous description of McCarthy could apply to Trump: “impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic…acted on impulse… tended to sensationalize the evidence he had…would neglect to do important homework… [had an] inattention to detail…. gifted with a sense of political timing…. His sense of what made drama and headlines was uncommonly good.”Michael Kruse wrote in Politico, “Trump simply could not have done what he did without the connections and machinations of Cohn.”“There is a straight line from McCarthy to Cohn to Trump. Trump learned from the worst.” Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin wrote in Forward.Trump has made Cohn’s mantra a hallmark of his presidency: “Never apologize, never admit you were wrong, and always go on the offensive”Republicans aren’t the only ones worried by Democratic Socialists’ recent successes in New York, Colorado and other races. Moderate Democrats are increasingly nervous.Several House members anxious to distance themselves from far-left progressives declared, “We are capitalist, not socialist.” Rep Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) told Fox News they “are bomb throwers, not problem solvers” and “should form their own party.”If anyone is moving toward socialism, it may be that elderly capitalist Trump. Under his increasingly autocratic leadership, the federal government has been taking equity positions in a range of private companies, which is seen as state socialism by some on the right, according to Forbes.“Since January 2025, the US government has invested $26.7 billion across thirty deals involving direct ownership,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.Trump’s red scare attacks are a sign of fear – as is his frantic demand that Congress stop all work until it passes his SAVE America Act and eliminates the filibuster. “We do that, we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said. “That is not election security, it is election engineering,” former president Bill Clinton pointed out.Trump is not a student of history and boasts that most of his reading consists of articles about himself. It may be that he doesn’t know the difference between socialists and communists. Does he know that Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, David Ben-Gurion and Thomas Paine were socialists? Or does he think all socialists are Bolsheviks?Trump was tutored by Cohn, who was known as McCarthy’s brain. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, the driving force behind the administration’s aggressive anti-immigration policies, has been called Trump’s brain.The red-baiting Mount Rushmore “communist menace” speech “bore the hallmarks” of Miller’s style, said one reporter covering the event, calling it an “apocalyptic script.” Maybe it was given away by the line: “The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”Miller is Trump’s minister for hate, racism and revenge. He has suggested Trump is God’s chosen one. Trump agreed, saying he was anointed by God to fulfil a historic purpose, Vanity Fair has reported. He has even posted an AI picture of himself as Jesus.At Mt. Rushmore he said, “And as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that. That’s for sure.”Neither does the founding document of the United States, the Daily Beast points out.There was nothing divinely inspired or accidental in Trump’s repeated conjuring up memories of McCarthyism and of that malignant era.Northwestern University history professor Edward Miller called Trump’s election a “major victory for the ideas of Robert Welch,” the founder of the ultra-right anti-communist John Birch Society.This nation that celebrates its 250th birthday has not been so divided since the Vietnam War. Instead of a patriotic message to uplift spirits and unify Americans behind ideals on which it was founded, the president offered division, anger and fear.We got a red scare from a president who can’t even paint a pool blue.The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.Follow us on Google