July 5, 2026, 3:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump had a warning. The nation is imperiled, he told a group of religious conservatives, by a force bent on destroying “the traditional American way of life.”
“These are hardcore, godless communists,” Trump said at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month, adding: “This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence.”
It was a speech that echoed the anti-communist zeal from the mid-20th century, delivered by a president who has struggled with a midterm message. Increasingly, he seems to be finding it, telling another crowd in North Dakota July 1 that communism in America is a bigger crisis than World War I, World War II or the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“It’s like a cancer that spreads and you better stop it fast,” Trump said.
Cost-of-living concerns may be on the minds of many Americans and the central midterm driver, but Trump often seems to lack enthusiasm for the issue, describing legislation tackling housing costs as a “big yawn” and affordability as a Democratic “con job.”
Railing against a new crop of progressive candidates has emerged as a more animating focus for a president who thrills to a fight.
The well-worn political tactic has long been employed by both parties as they seek to define the other by their extremes. The trend of democratic socialists and other leftwing challengers to establishment candidates winning Democratic primaries is giving the GOP ammunition this cycle, and has become a central preoccupation for Trump.
Nevermind that there are no card-carrying communists in the bunch, Trump has been eager to deploy a label with deep historical resonance and is seizing on the more open embrace of socialism by some candidates. Leaders on the left accuse the president of Red Scare-style fearmongering, and say it won’t work.
“These labels are outdated and don’t stick in my opinion,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, a prominent progressive group.
A leftward lurch could present challenges for a party facing an otherwise favorable election cycle, though, and Democrats are grappling with how to handle the populist upheaval.
New midterm message
Republicans seeking to maintain control of Congress have quickly adopted the president’s approach as they work to steer the election away from a focus on Trump, whose low approval rating threatens to drag the party down.
“We want it to be a battle of ideologies,” said Republican strategist T.W. Arrighi.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said June 30 that the midterms will be a “contrast election,” one he has been framing as a clash “between common sense and crazy.”
“And now you can add another line there: It’s common sense versus communism,” he added.
Democrats have been on a roll over the last year, winning a series off-year and special elections and flipping districts that Trump carried.
The party has focused on driving down consumer costs, seizing on what polling shows is deep dissatisfaction about the economy and worries about affordability. The Iran war has made such concerns more acute, hiking the price of gas and other goods and fueling inflation, which hit 4.2% last month.
The affordability debate also is playing out in Democratic primaries, though, and some of the candidates who emerged victorious offered more scathing critiques of capitalism and more drastic policy prescriptions.
They’ve also delivered stinging criticism of Israel, pushed for an aggressive response to Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts and accused Democratic leaders of not doing enough to counter the president, roiling the party as it seeks to unify against Trump.
“I think the electorate is angry at both Donald Trump and the Republican administration of our government and they’re also angry with the Democratic establishment for not effectively standing up to Donald Trump,” said Geevarghese. “So that’s, I think, the galvanizing issue.”
Democrats on defense
In New York, three congressional candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won June 23 primary contests, beating more mainstream Democrats. Like Mamdani, two of the winning candidates – Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez – are democratic socialists.
Some moderate Democrats in Congress took it as a call to action. After the group of Mamdani-backed candidates swept to victory, Rep. Tom Suozzi, the co-chair of the House Problem Solvers Caucus, put together a platform called “Promise to America,” a set of principles he urged centrist Democrats to rally around. Among the stated values in the agenda are safety, human dignity – and capitalism.
Suozzi, who represents part of the mostly-red Long Island, likened democratic socialists to MAGA conservatives – they’re both “very extreme,” he said. They also have outorganized the center-left and right, he argued.
“We’ve got to wake up,” he told USA TODAY.
CNN reported that Avila Chevalier deleted old social media posts with “sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and Soviet figures, including Vladimir Lenin.” One included the phrase “seize the means of production.” She denied being a communist.
After the New York election, Trump said the Democratic Party is afraid to fight back against “this new breed of sick people.”
“They don’t have the courage to do so,” Trump added at the Faith & Freedom event. “So they’re turning communist themselves, becoming a communist party.”
Matt Bennett, a former Democratic operative who now works for the centrist group Third Way, said Trump and MAGA have “ridiculously exaggerated” what’s happening on the left but Democrats still have a problem.
“The weird thing here is they don’t have to,” Bennett said of the communist rhetoric. “The stuff that some of these (democratic socialist) folks have said is truly radical in ways that we’ve never seen before from the left, not in modern times.”
“The problem for Democrats is there is a core of truth to this. Unlike most of what Trump says,” Bennett added.
Trump and the GOP have long sought to portray Democrats as socialists and communists.
It’s a familiar line of attack in states such as Florida, which has a large number of transplants from Latin American countries who fled socialist dictatorships, but Florida GOP Chair Evan Power said it’s now more resonant.
“That only makes it a more crystal clear message now,” he said. “They are here. They’re not hiding themselves anymore. They let the masks slip.”
As the GOP works to put Democrats on the defensive over the party’s leftward swing, primary results keep providing them with more fodder. Another democratic socialist, 29-year-old Melat Kiros, won a congressional primary in Colorado on June 30, defeating a longtime Democratic incumbent.
‘People are feared out’
Democrats argue the GOP is trying to distract from a failure to help average Americans financially. The election ultimately will be about the economy, they say.
“I think that people are feared out,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, said in an MS NOW interview, adding: “They just want a solution. They want their groceries to be more affordable. They want to figure out how we’re going to get health care. They want our housing to get under control.”
Geevarghese, with the Bernie Sanders-backed Our Revolution, said progressive candidates are tapping into a sense that elites are benefiting at the expense of ordinary Americans.
“These candidates are all putting forward an aggressive argument that government needs to be taken back from the rich and powerful and put to work for working people,” Geevarghese said.
It’s a populist wave that Trump himself rose to power on, he said.
“I think this is a moment where you’re going to see the electorate swinging from a right-wing populism to a more progressive populism,” Geevarghese said. “I think that is the contest that we’re in and that’s what Trump’s trying to stop by using the Red Scare.”
Republicans acknowledge that consumer prices remain a big concern, and argue Trump’s policies have helped ease financial pressures, pointing to his tax cut legislation passed last year and efforts to tackle prescription drug prices.
Trump’s midterm distractions
Yet Trump has sometimes been dismissive of affordability concerns. He recently undercut his own party’s push to tout a landmark housing bill that figured to be a central part of midterm messaging.
Asked if he plans to sign the bipartisan legislation that passed with strong GOP support in both the House and Senate, Trump said he hasn’t decided and called the bill “a big yawn” and “so unimportant.” Trump has variously described affordability as a “hoax,” “scam,” “fake word” and a “con job,” saying Democrats are to blame for higher prices.
Trump has been staging rallies around the country to sell his economic agenda, but often digresses into other issues. He lately has been focused on D.C. renovation efforts that Democrats have derided as vanity projects, including a White House ballroom, triumphal arch and renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
In polling those are not the issues that Americans list as most important to them. Nor is it what voters are bringing up in states where the GOP needs to win congressional seats this fall such as Iowa and Wisconsin, close allies of the president acknowledge.
“The president knows that the issues that are most important to the American people are kitchen table issues,” Johnson said in an interview with USA TODAY, adding: “I think at the end of the day, the president’s going to remind the voters of that. We certainly will.”
Polls show most Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, and his approval rating is underwater in key districts. A New York Times/Siena poll of six battleground Senate races found Trump is underwater in all of them.
“It’s obvious that the Republicans need to do this because they can’t talk about what Trump is doing because it’s super unpopular,” Bennett said of the GOP’s push to highlight Democratic Socialists of America candidates.
The survey had warning signs for Democrats, though, too. In five of the six states, a majority of voters said the Democratic Party is too far to the left, indicating Republicans could find fertile ground in labeling opponents as extreme.
Democrats’ leftward lurch is creating new complications for a party that is favored to retake the House and competitive in key Senate races.
“If it is a referendum on Trump… they are screwed,” Bennett said of the GOP. “But if it becomes a referendum on the craziest ideas of the DSA, then they’re in better shape.”
