ArcaMax

PARIS – Did we all just somehow get shoved into a time machine and transported back to 1980? Because why is the sitting U.S. president talking about communism like he’s trying to win a Cold War reenactment? How can he possibly think this is a winning strategy for midterm elections when he’s been acting like the biggest commie around?

Earlier this month, Trump mentioned communism at a rate of about once every two minutes in a 30-minute spiel, as CNN has pointed out.

“The United States of America will NEVER be a communist country,” Trump wrote on social media just a few days ago.

His political opponents are – you guessed it – commies.

Other nations are also run by commies, but only when they’re not buying American weapons. Once the purchase order goes through, apparently ideology gets relegated to the fine print.

It’s like how Trump and his family have also become chummy with theocratic Saudi Arabia ever since it tossed $2 billion from its public investment fund into Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s investment firm – and even more cash into a series of golf tournaments held at Trump’s own resorts. Now suddenly, we learn this week that he’s cool with the Saudis having nuclear enrichment and power.

The exact same kind of nuclear program that he cites – at least this week – as his reason for being in a useless war of choice with Iran and American troops dying in the Middle East. Guess Iran just hasn’t pulled out the checkbook yet.

Trump made a big show of bringing aboard Elon Musk to slash through wasteful spending at the beginning of his term, eliminating dodgy development cash schemes – only to now revive them in the form of millions of dollars being spent to serve his administration’s own pet causes in Europe, with $12 million going to British civil society sycophants alone, according to the Guardian, citing State Department documents.

Co-opting the government apparatus to serve your personal brand sounds like what Stalin did in the Soviet Union from 1920 to 1950. Or China under the Chinese Communist Party. Or East Germany during the Cold War. Or Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. All of these have one thing in common. Spoiler alert: none of them spent their days insisting that they weren’t communist.

It’s no wonder that despite Trump’s self-deluded communism obsession, even Republicans now view capitalism about 10 percent less favorably than in 2019, according to a new poll commissioned by Fox News.

And recent election results show a surge among self-identifying socialists. Trump only has himself to blame. Just ask Republicans in Trump’s own party, 42 percent of whom, as CNN points out, now believe that “the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy.” Up from just 30 percent in 2018.

Trump was supposed to fix that. To stop a corrupt system from stuffing its pockets on the down low or blowing taxpayer cash on self-serving head-scratchers. Replacing that system with one where you put yourself at the center of the corruption, in full public view, is not what people wanted.

I’m talking about the personal family and friends cashing in on Pentagon contracts. And the U.S. president treating the war he started with Iran for his Israeli donors as an ongoing vehicle for rapidly self-contradicting public statements that seem to serve primarily to manipulate the markets for profit. And if you really want to cash in, you can now pay the American president to get exclusive early access to those statements through his own private platform, Truth Social. The rest of us will have to wait to find out about the start of World War III.

I’m also talking about the constant commie-style hold-ups of America’s allies and of the American people themselves. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s attempt to make Americans pay extra taxes – otherwise known as “tariffs” – on allied trade. But now Trump’s trying to argue some “forced labor” excuse to bring the cash grab back through the back door.

Europeans currently on their five-week paid vacation from their 35-hour-a-week, full-time job would be thrilled to learn that the American president thinks they’re being treated like slaves. Know who agrees with Trump here in Europe on that issue? Actual commies.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of the crypto-commies who self-describe as democratic socialists because the commie brand is so toxic, and who are currently racking up electoral wins on the Democrat side. But they’re arguing in favor of taking more money from taxpayers to put it into the usual government-run black hole under the dodgy auspices of serving the collective good. Which somehow still has more populist appeal than Trump’s self-serving approach. People wanted the corruption to stop – not to see it replaced with a feudal system that caters to a party of one.

Don’t want people to gravitate to commies? Then try not acting like you’re an even more unattractive proposition, especially to capitalists.