At an event identified by the Biden campaign, which shared footage from the gathering, as a fundraiser, former President Donald Trump — Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee this year — argued that Democrats “went directly to Communism.” Though listeners of his laughed at his description as though it was a joke, Trump’s previously used this line of argument.
“I always said, our country will never be a socialist country,” Trump insisted. “And I was right. Unfortunately, they went directly to Communism, okay? They skipped socialism along the way.”
There is no real-world foundation for any of this.
Communism is a political and economic system generally involving strict control stretching across nearly all — or all — areas of life. It’s not economic regulation or the mere existence of a justice system. It’s secret police, punishments for just criticizing the government, and aggressive restrictions on political gatherings. It’s an abject lack of due process for individuals targeted by authorities, figures often left to struggle through dubiously defined stints in detention that can culminate in death, like the infamous, recent fate of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny under Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime that continues taking its cues from these historical trends.
Only in a fantasy world does any of this mirror recent circumstances experienced by Trump and his supporters.
Trump is facing four criminal cases — and in each, prosecutors were compelled to outline detailed, precise allegations of how he violated the law. These indictments all required approval from a grand jury before they were even finalized. Trump’s federal case alleging attempts at election interference was halted to allow for appeals from Trump now pending before the nation’s highest court, and a judge in Trump’s state case in Georgia struck — for now — some of prosecutors’ original allegations, saying they’d failed to make a sufficiently arguable case. And Trump remains perfectly free to run for president and presumably garner tens of millions of votes in a transparent electoral process.
