In public, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been throwing around the term “socialism” as if it were electoral kryptonite. There was Trump’s op-ed of “open-borders socialism,” the State of the Union address in which he trashed socialism for an applause line, and seized on the economic collapse of Venezuela as evidence that the politics of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would turn America into a car-less, childless, hamburger-bereft future.
In private, however, Trump apparently fears that this socialism thing could have legs. The Daily Beast reports that the president has been privately telling confidants for months that progressive, populist-tinged proposals like student-loan forgiveness and Medicare for All—or, as he allegedly calls it, “free stuff”—could threaten his prospects in 2020, and that running against “socialism” might get tricky:
It might be an uphill battle—especially with younger voters who don’t remember the Cold War. According to a poll from PRRI, 54% of Americans view socialism as a benevolent government that “provides citizens with health insurance, retirement support, and access to free higher education,” while only 43% said that a socialist government “controls key parts of the economy, such as utilities, transportation, and communications industries.” Millennials, after all, are more likely to associate socialism with Nordic paradises like Sweden than secret police and gulags. In a Gallup survey earlier this year, 58% of younger voters, ages 18 to 34, said that socialism was “good [for] the country.” They were also generally in favor of what Trump might define as “free stuff”: 60% wanted government-run health care, and 57% wanted the government to take responsibility for higher education.
If there is a silver lining for the Trump campaign, it’s that poll respondents tend to have no shared definition for the term “socialism” itself, meaning that Republicans still have room to help define a concept for which most Democrats—especially those in the top tier who aren’t Joe Biden—aren’t willing to provide an affirmative defense. While Bernie Sanders has no immediate problem with being called a socialist, Elizabeth Warren states that she is a capitalist at heart; Kamala Harris has bluntly said she is not a democratic socialist; and Pete Buttigieg often suggests there isn’t even a point in discussing semantics. (“It’s true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists,” he said during one debate. “If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re gonna do? Say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists.”)
Of course, Trump understands the appeal of socialist rhetoric because he engages in it himself, albeit within a pseudo-populist framework. At the beginning of his presidency, Trump floated the idea of raising taxes on the rich, and promised that “the government’s gonna pay” for universal health care after he repealed the Affordable Care Act. Trump never followed through with those promises, but he has indulged his passion for a controlled economy in other ways, ordering U.S. businesses to shut down operations in China and directing billions of dollars in subsidies to farmers hurt by his trade war. In doing so, he has helped move the Overton window as much as Sanders or Warren—and made it harder for Republicans to protest future progressive uses (or abuses) of executive power. Trump ran up the deficit to give corporate America a tax cut, and Republicans said nothing. Maybe the next time around, voters will decide that, if they’re going to blow up the national debt, they might as well get something in return.
— The epic meltdown that ended Travis Kalanick
— Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s curious sociopathy
— SolarCity: how Elon Musk gambled Tesla to save another project
— “It’s a f--king scam”: beware the Hollywood Con Queen
— The nine-figure bill for Trump’s “very inexpensive” golf habit
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.
