President Trump has reacted to the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America by sounding the alarm about communism, which greatly upset Associated Press fact-checker Melissa Goldin on Thursday because, according to her, only card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA can be called communists.
Goldin cited two Trump quotes. The first was, “It’s the biggest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, September 11th.” The second was referring to Democrats as “hard core, godless communists.”
She also lamented, “But experts say his claims, echoed by Vice President J.D. Vance and other Republican leaders, are off base.”
After her introduction, Goldin delivered her verdict:
THE FACTS: No candidate openly belonging to the U.S. Communist Party has ever been elected to state or federal office, according to experts. Although there are fringes of the Democratic Party that have expressed support for communist ideas, experts say that they still advocate for a market-based economy and that it is inaccurate to paint the entire party with such a broad brush. Trump recently began referring to Democrats pejoratively as ‘Dumocrats.’
If you were wondering where the AP fact-check article denouncing the left for calling Trump and Republicans fascists is, there isn’t one. There is this 2024 article by Will Weissert and Laurie Kellman that seeks to portray the issue as complicated.
As for Goldin, she continued by citing one of her hand-picked experts, ‘“The reality is that none of these major political figures in the Democratic Party, even those further out on the left, are identifying as communists,’ said Marc Selverstone, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs, adding that it’s an opportunity to portray Democrats as marginal figures.”
She then continued, “Selverstone, who authored a book on international communism, noted that Democrats who are more closely aligned with socialism and democratic socialism are still far from supporting basic communist ideals such as the abolition of private property or central economic planning.”
According to the AP, fascism accusations are nuanced, but when a Democratic candidate has a record of praising Kim Il-Sung, Fidel Castro, and Joseph Stalin, and endorsing government-run agricultural cooperatives, that is to be brushed aside as no big deal, as the fact-checkers did the same with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's own history supporting communism.
However, Goldin was not done. Trying to sanitize the DSA, she wrote, “Rather, democratic socialists believe in providing a more extensive social safety net within the confines of democracy. The movement often centers on securing universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy and stricter corporate regulation.”
Eventually, Goldin pulled a page from The Daily Show’s playbook and said you cannot call the DSA communists because the CPUSA doesn’t, “Communist Party USA has a small footprint in current U.S. politics. It brought in about 20,000 members over the past several years and is in the process of assessing how many are active, according to co-chair Joe Sims. He agreed that recent Democratic candidates cannot accurately be described as members of his party.”
Goldin also claimed, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, a declared democratic socialist who upset a fifth-term New York City congressman for the Democratic nomination to run in November, is facing scrutiny over deleted social media posts sympathetic to communism and related topics. She said in a statement sent to The Associated Press that she is ‘proud to be a democratic socialist,’ and her campaign confirmed that she does not identify as a communist.”
She used similar logic when defending Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner. Wrapping it all up, Goldin recalled:
There is a long history of U.S. politicians calling opponents communist or Marxist without evidence — perhaps most infamously, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led efforts to blacklist accused communists in the 1950s. McCarthy’s chief counsel during his televised hearings was Roy Cohn, who became Trump’s mentor and fixer as he rose to prominence as a real estate mogul in New York.
‘I think it’s part of the arsenal of the right, which today means the Republican Party, largely, to pull out these accusations of communism, of godless communism,’ said Maurice Isserman, a professor of American history at Hamilton College and an expert in American communism.
It should be noted Isserman was a founding member of the DSA but resigned after its “politically and morally bankrupt response” to October 7.
Whether you call them communists or not, the DSA is not the American version of the archetypical Scandinavian social democrat. If the fact-checkers want to say that you cannot call socialists communists because they do not call themselves communists despite their history of praising communist dictators and their policies, then they should apply that same standard whenever Democrats call Republicans racists or fascists despite GOP denials.
