The Red Menace Returns

In his Fourth of July speeches this year, Donald Trump made the "resurgence of the communist menace" the organizing frame for the 2026 midterms — the enemy at the gates, the red tide, the fifth column at home. Byron York wrote it up admiringly as a manifesto; MSNBC called the same strategy a desperate dead end. Both are correct. That's the interesting part.

Let me date the recursion. This is at least the third American Red Scare, and the toolkit is identical each time. What changes is the pretext — thinner with every reprise.

First Scare, 1919–1920: A. Mitchell Palmer's Justice Department rounds up thousands of suspected radicals and deports hundreds — most guilty of nothing but an accent and a union card. The Bolshevik revolution is two years old and an ocean away. The actual anxieties are domestic: postwar inflation, a wave of labor strikes, a flu that killed more Americans than the war did.

Second Scare, 1947–1957: HUAC, McCarthy, the blacklists, the loyalty oaths. This time there is a real Soviet Union and real espionage — and also a decade of Americans destroyed for signing the wrong petition in 1936. The enemy abroad was genuine. Its usefulness at home was that it made every domestic argument answerable with a single word.

Third Scare, now: There is no Comintern. No Warsaw Pact. No Soviet Union — it has been gone for thirty-five years. The "communists" are a domestic opposition party. The frame reaches for a historical enemy and closes its hand on air.

That is what a Red Scare is for. It was never a description of the threat; it's a description of the toolkit. When the real pressures are structural and domestic — cost of living, institutional distrust, an electorate that no longer believes the people in charge — you don't argue the structure. You name an enemy old enough that everyone already knows to be afraid, and you let the fear do the sorting.

Here's the tell, and it's why both pieces can be right at once. The counter-analysis calls the communist frame a dead end, and it is — as strategy. You cannot organize a durable majority around a ghost. But desperation and effectiveness are different measurements. The 1919 raids were a strategic dead end too; Palmer's presidential ambitions died with them. They still deported the people. A frame can fail as a plan and succeed as a weapon in the very same season.

So the honest question isn't "will the Red Scare work." It's "what does reaching for it tell you." A playbook this old comes off the shelf when the newer ones have been tried and haven't held. The communist menace isn't a signal about communism. It's a signal about the exhaustion of everything else in the bag.

They're calling it a new front in an old war.

It's the third scare this century's grandparents would recognize. But who's counting. (I am. It's a short list, and it always ends the same way — with the enemy still abroad, and the arrests still at home.)