When the GOP turned communist

Republicans used to rail about state-owned enterprise. Now they celebrate it.

One of these is a Soviet socialist realist propaganda poster. One is an image that Trump’s Department of Labor put out to mark Labor Day. Enough said.

In late July, the official social media account of the Republican Party boasted that Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will “drive the return of the great American car.” It then posted an image of Donald Trump before a rusted yellow Lada, a famously awful car manufactured by Soviet Russia in the 1970s.

The internet had fun with the @GOP’s “make American cars communist again” screwup. I posted some of my favorite Soviet-era Lada jokes. “How do you double the value of a Lada? Fill up the gas tank!” “First prize in raffle—one Lada; second prize—two Ladas!”

But I was also reminded of a serious conversation I’d recently had with some veterans of the anti-communist struggle in Eastern Europe, men and women who venerated America and were horrified by Trump’s attacks on our democracy. One of them said to me: “You know we all read Project 2025. And it’s the most communist document we’ve ever seen.”

He didn’t mean “communist” in the sense of ending private enterprise or enforced economic equality or giving away free stuff—a caricature that still inspires some, enrages others, and confuses a few, as when Trump warned last year that Democrats would throw everyone into a “communist system where everyone gets healthcare.”

No, this old freedom fighter was referring to what Eastern Europeans called “real existing communism” (or socialism)—the actual system that the Soviet Union installed from Estonia to Bulgaria, which used a revolutionary ideology to justify brutal, stultifying, one-party rule over all aspects of life. As someone who witnessed that system as a child in Poland and later worked with opponents of similar dictatorships, I thought the ironic comparison rang true.

After all, though MAGA enforcers like Stephen Miller rail against “communist woke culture,” in their rhetoric, mannerisms, and obsession with ideological purity, they’re a carbon copy of the Bolsheviks of old. Consider Miller's April rant about purging a “saboteur” (a favorite communist accusation) from the Justice Department. What American talks this way? Is there any doubt on which side he and others like him would have been in a Soviet show trial?

Then there is the class warfare of Project 2025, which complained that a “highly educated managerial elite runs things, rather than the humble, patriotic working families.” Lenin and Stalin might have changed the words slightly—pitting “bourgeois elites” against the “proletariat." Their victims would have recognized the common idea and likely result: working Americans paying tariffs and losing health care, while a new elite claims to rule on their behalf as it keeps all the spoils.

There are communist echoes as well in the Trump administration’s promise that the economic harm its tariffs are causing today—fewer dolls for the kids this Christmas—is worth enduring because of the "new golden age" it will someday bring. Likewise, Lenin dismissed the hardships suffered in the early days of communism as the “‘birth pangs’ of a new society.” Stalin justified the suffering he imposed by arguing that “not a single important step has been taken” since the Russian revolution “which did not involve certain sacrifices ... which will be more than compensated for in the near future”—a future that of course never came.

The MAGA-communist analogy applies to their shared view of education—that it should focus narrowly on training students for professions, rather than provide the broad view of history, the arts, and science needed to prepare them for democratic citizenship. Let the educated city youth plough the fields in the countryside, decreed Chairman Mao; let the transgender studies majors work the farms when we deport the migrants, says the MAGA crowd.

Perhaps the most important parallel is that the MAGA/Trump Party believes, like its communist predecessors, that every institution is political and must ultimately come under party control. To such a movement, it’s inconceivable that civil servants would be hired for ability rather than loyalty, or that there could be an independent Justice Department prosecuting the president’s friends as well as his enemies, or government offices reporting facts about public health, the economy, or the weather that don’t support the party line, or public museums deciding on their own what to exhibit. Even private companies shouldn’t be allowed to get rich without giving public tribute (or the kinds of gold trinkets Soviet rulers loved) to the nation’s leader.

In the communist countries, this principle applied to every sphere of life. If you wanted to chair a university department or be a school principal or a factory manager, you had to be politically reliable, if not a party member outright. Second-rate people took advantage of this, realizing they could get plum jobs if they mouthed the right words or reported on their co-workers, while talented people with integrity were held back. We’re starting to see this at federal agencies—the State Department, for example, has favored for promotion the mostly white, male, and not very distinguished members of a group called the “Ben Franklin Fellowship” that aligned itself with Trump’s “anti-woke” agenda, even as it fired more accomplished officers. The result will be a government staffed by opportunistic mediocrities.

Finally there is the comparison almost too obvious to mention: This supposedly conservative administration is now demanding CEOs let the government take partial ownership of their companies—literally state control of the means of production. Republicans went nuts over a socialist candidate for mayor of New York wanting to create five little city-owned grocery stores (for the record, a bad idea), but mostly seem fine with the president boasting about seizing shares in the Intel Corporation “for free.” They know that state ownership leads to less competition, more corruption, and poorer products. Then again, a party blindly falling in line with its leader is also a feature of communism.

Years ago, I left a country that had a communist regime imposed on it by force. It seems ridiculous that Americans would willingly embrace a way of running our country that is so contrary to American values and to our experience of what works—and I still don’t believe they will.

But we’d better be aware of who and what we’re up against. Or we may all be driving Ladas soon!

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

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