John Stoehr
September 28, 2024 8:12AM ET
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump makes a campaign stop at manufacturer FALK Production in Walker, Michigan, U.S. September 27, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Recently, Donald Trump had this to say about Kamala Harris:
“She's a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”
On the one hand, this isn’t worth taking seriously. After all, he’s putting everything he has mentally into stringing together words, any words, in the hope of scamming us into believing his lies. Whether it’s “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist” or “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” it’s all kinda the same to the delusional and demented.
On the other hand, we should take this seriously.
I don’t mean asking whether Harris is a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.” She isn’t. I mean asking whether Trump is. Most of us understand why he’s a fascist. Too few of us understand why he’s a communist. In any conventional sense of the word, that’s what he is.
And economics can have nothing to do with it.
Just ask Ana Navarro, a former Republican who fled communist Nicaragua. At the Democratic National Convention, she said:
"Trump and his minions call Kamala a communist. I know communism. I fled communism from Nicaragua when I was 8 years old. I don’t take it lightly. And let me tell you what communist dictators do. …
"They attack the free press. They call them the enemy of the people, like Ortega does in Nicaragua. They put their unqualified relatives in cushy government jobs, so they can get rich off their positions, like the Castros do in Cuba. And they refuse to accept legitimate elections when they lose and call for violence to stay in power, like Maduro is doing right now in Venezuela.
"Now you tell me something. Do any of those things sound familiar? Is there anybody running for president who reminds you of that?"
That’s about power, but economics plays a role, too.
History is filled with communist dictators who enacted economic agendas not because their policies were based on sound principles and solid data but because they served an immediate political interest. The outcome was sometimes the ruination of their country’s populations.
Trump wants to decimate the labor supply by deporting 20 million “illegal immigrants.” He wants to impose an across-the-board tariff of 20 percent and more on all imported goods. And he wants to seize control of the Federal Reserve Bank’s power to set interest rates.
A new report by the Peterson Institute, a very conservative think tank in Washington, found that these economic policies would “not only fail to solve inflation – they would make it much worse,” according to CNN. They would moreover depress growth, spike inflation and wipe out jobs to such a degree that the carnage would be felt well into 2040.
“We find that ironically, despite his ‘make the foreigners pay’ rhetoric, this package of policies does more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world,” the Peterson Institute’s working paper said.
This is not news.
Anyone who knows anything about economics knows indiscriminate tariffs would help no one while harming everyone. Yet he keeps talking about them as if he cares about their real-world consequences. He doesn’t. He only cares about whether they work for him politically.
In that, he’s just like a communist dictator.
But there’s more to being a communist than power and economics.
There’s character, too, or lack of it.
The most important thing to Donald Trump is whether you like him.
If you do, you’re good. If you don’t, you’re bad.
It doesn’t matter that you once called yourself a “Black Nazi.” It doesn’t matter that you once said you would like slavery to return so you can own a few slaves. It doesn't matter that you once said you liked “tranny porn” and that you fantasize about peeping on women in public gyms.
You can do all the things that North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has reportedly done and it won’t matter to Trump.
But Robinson likes him.
So he endorsed Robinson.
Former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory warned for years that Robinson was a “ticking time bomb.” He told CNN that even the quickest glance at his record would reveal things that are disqualifying.
But McCrory is one of those RINOs (Republicans in name only). His warnings went nowhere, because if you don’t like Trump, he doesn’t like you. Due to the scandal surrounding Robinson, Trump might lose North Carolina. But defeat won’t be his fault. It will be McCrory’s.
Such are the hallmarks of communist dictator.
To be sure, my argument is a hard sell. Reasonable people may buy the idea that Donald Trump is a fascist, but not that he’s a communist. After all, he’s a billionaire. He’s on the side of the billionaire class.
How can he be a communist?
But reasonable people are overthinking it.
Trump isn’t defending capitalism. He’s defending white power. If you prefer, he’s going to war against the enemies of the white collective. He’s prepared to use every instrument of the state toward that end.
Reducing the labor supply (deportations), increasing taxes (tariffs) and seizing the power to set interest rates will hurt the country generally. But they will hurt nonwhite people more than white people. It would be a race to the bottom for everyone except the richest of Americans.
But Trump wouldn’t be to blame.
He’d find someone outside the white collective to accuse.
Just like a communist.
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