A SPECTRE seems to be haunting the US president. A few days ago, Reuters calculated that Donald Trump had invoked communism 81 times in his utterances and outbursts over the past two weeks. This included citing it as a bigger threat to America than both the world wars and 9/11. He has kept it up since then. Just this past weekend, he declared on his Truth Social platform: “I would often say in Speeches, and otherwise, America will never be a Socialist Country, and I was 100% correct, the Dumocrats skipped Socialism, and went all the way down to Communism. AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY!”

Interpreting Trump’s rants has become a full-time occupation for some, and there’s an emerging consensus that the Republican Party descended yet again into its anti-communist comfort zone after a bunch of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won last month’s primaries, with the phenomenon echoed from Wisconsin to California.

The DSA is not ‘communist’ by any stretch of the imagination, but the word ‘socialism’ no longer inspires fear among growing segments of the American electorate. A decade ago, thanks mainly to Bernie Sanders, it briefly became the most googled word in the US. Many among........

© Dawn