No, Zohran Mamdani Isn’t a Communist
Trump tries to smear the NYC mayoral candidate. But it’s Trump himself who uses Communist tactics.
DONALD TRUMP CLAIMS that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, is a Communist. “You have a Communist running,” Trump told reporters at the White House last Friday. If Mamdani were to win, he warned, “We’ve got ourselves a Communist mayor in New York. And I don’t like Communist mayors.”
Mamdani isn’t a Communist. He’s a democratic socialist. He wants rent control, free childcare, and tax hikes on the rich. These ideas, whatever their merits, are familiar in democracies. He also proposes a few city-run grocery stores, but he supports collaboration with the private sector and decentralization of education policy. That’s not communism.
When Americans think of communism, we don’t think of a utopia like the one Karl Marx imagined. We think of real regimes that have used and abused Marxist ideology: highly centralized governments that cripple opposition parties, suppress information, constrict civil liberties, crush local autonomy, commandeer industry, and use police to control the population.
Mamdani hasn’t done any of those things. But Trump has.
SINCE JANUARY, Trump has grabbed so much power and committed so many abuses that it’s hard to keep track of the damage. Let’s review just the past month.
1. Seizing cities. On August 11, Trump took control of the police in Washington, D.C., and announced that he was sending in the National Guard. He decreed that henceforth, when protesters spat at police, officers would be authorized to “hit real hard” and “do whatever the hell they want.”
Federal law barred the president from extending such a takeover beyond thirty days without congressional approval. But Trump dismissed that deadline. “I’m going to just say it’s a national emergency,” he shrugged on August 22. “And if I have a national emergency, I can keep the troops there as long as I want.”
Last week, Trump said he would take similar measures in Chicago. “We have the right to do it,” he asserted. On Saturday, he posted an image, copied from an X account, of military helicopters over Chicago with a warning: “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
Previously, Trump had deployed National Guardsmen and Marines to Los Angeles. Last week, a federal judge ruled that this deployment “violated the Posse Comitatus Act,” which forbids the use of military forces for domestic law enforcement.
2. Persecuting opponents. On August 13, Trump targeted Senator Adam Schiff, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others who had implicated him in Russia’s 2016 election interference. Turning to Attorney General Pam Bondi, he pointedly said: “I’m looking at Pam because I hope something’s going to be done about it.” The next day, Trump alleged that former FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were “criminals, and they should be taken care of.” On August 29, he said his accusers “should be arrested,” and he welcomed the prospect of seeing Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan “handcuffed and arrested live on TV.”
Trump isn’t kidding. He has personally ordered criminal investigations of several critics. In other cases, he has used such threats to intimidate dissidents or institutions that don’t bend to his will. On August 12, he threatened to facilitate a lawsuit against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who wasn’t complying with Trump’s demands to cut interest rates. On August 24, he threatened to reinvestigate former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had rebuked him on TV. On August 27, he called for criminal charges against George Soros.
President Joe Biden, anticipating Trump’s campaign of retribution, issued preemptive pardons in January to Schiff and other members of the House January 6th Committee. Trump is trying to nullify those pardons by dismissing them as staff work. “All those pardons that he gave to some very bad people, very unpatriotic people, very evil people—it looks to me like those pardons are worthless,” Trump argued on August 25. He asserted that Biden “never approved any of this stuff.”
3. Manipulating elections. More than a hundred times since returning to office, Trump has insisted that the only general election he lost, in 2020, was “rigged” or “stolen.” On August 21, he repeated that in 2020, “I won by millions of votes.” Lacking evidence for this thoroughly debunked claim, he instead cited his fellow authoritarian, Vladimir Putin. Trump boasted that when they met behind closed doors in Alaska on August 15, Putin had assured him that “you won that election by so much” but it “was rigged.”
On August 18, Trump said his opponents, the Democrats, could win elections only through the “fraud” of mail-in voting. To prevent that outcome, he declared that he was preparing an executive order to “get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” He cast aside state and local control of elections, decreeing that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”
Last week, Trump turned up the pressure. He announced that he was moving the U.S. Space Force headquarters out of Colorado to punish that state for authorizing mail-in ballots. “Colorado just went to all mail-in voting. That means they cheat,” he said. “That’s a big reason why they just lost the whole Space Command situation that is going to Alabama.”
4. Suppressing information. On August 1, Trump fired the commissioner of labor statistics for reporting job numbers he didn’t like. On August 11, he replaced her with a flunkie. On August 13, to justify his takeover of Washington, D.C., he called the district’s crime statistics a “total fraud.” On August 22, he warned the district’s mayor that if she continued to report crime numbers he didn’t accept, “bad things will happen, including a complete and total Federal takeover of the City!”
On August 13, facing negative approval ratings in nearly every public survey, Trump claimed to be the “Highest polling Republican President in HISTORY.” He dismissed the negative numbers as “fake news,” and he said the Federal Communications Commission should revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks that covered him unfavorably.
5. Nationalizing industry. On August 22, Trump proclaimed that “the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL.” He said he had personally extracted this concession from the company’s CEO, and he likened it to squeezing money from a real-estate developer. He added that he would use the power of the state to solicit similar concessions from other firms: “I will also help those companies that make such lucrative deals with the United States.”
6. Curtailing civil liberties. On August 25, Trump acknowledged the Supreme Court had ruled it was unconstitutional to ban the burning of the American flag. “They called it freedom of speech,” he observed. Nevertheless, he announced—and repeated, to make sure his contempt for the Court’s decision was clear—that under a new executive order he was signing, “If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail.”
7. Attacking the judiciary. For months, Trump has been skirting or defying court orders. On August 29, a federal appeals court ruled that many import taxes he had imposed by fiat were illegal because Congress had not granted “the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.” In response, he said the judges who had ruled against him “don’t love the country.” He concluded, “I have the right as president to do it. It’s an economic emergency.”
8. Controlling arts and culture. In February, Trump made himself the chairman of the Kennedy Center. On August 13, he gloated that nominees for Kennedy Center honors “all went through me” and that “I turned down plenty” of them for being “too woke.” On August 19, he complained that the Smithsonian Institution was promoting material about “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was. . . . We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums” to impose changes.
On Monday, Trump applauded West Point’s cancelation of an award ceremony for Tom Hanks, who had previously disparaged him. (The decision was actually made by West Point’s alumni association.) Trump told Hollywood to get the message and fall in line: “We don’t need destructive, WOKE recipients getting our cherished American Awards!!! Hopefully the Academy Awards, and other Fake Award Shows, will review their Standards and Practices.”
LIKE EVERY BOSS of a Communist country, Trump says he’s not a dictator. But he warns his domestic opponents that if he were to claim that title, Americans would support him. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator,’” he boasted in the Oval Office on August 25, shortly before signing his order against flag burning. The next day, at a cabinet meeting worthy of Fidel Castro—at more than three hours, the propaganda session was “the longest televised presidential event in history,” according to Trump’s press secretary—the president added: “The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.” He suggested that Americans would impose no limits on his power: “Most people say, ‘If you call him a dictator, [but] he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.”
So don’t worry about Mamdani. New York won’t turn Communist if he becomes mayor. The real peril is that New York, like every other city in this country, is at the mercy of the tyrant we already elected.
What is so remarkable and distressing is that if a Democratic President did ANY of the things Will outlined, he or she would be vilified, condemned, examined and likely impeached by the hypocrites on the other side of the aisle. We are truly living in a Bizarro world.
They said FDR was a Communist and he wound up saving the Western World from both fascism and communism. He got the Oligarch class that he was tangentially a member of under some kind of controls just in time to save them from themselves.