The Game Is On: President Trump Understands Communism Is More Than Just an Ideology

Broke: Communism was created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the mid-19th century.

Woke: Communism was unleashed by the French Revolution, which began in 1789. Robespierre and the Terror prefigure all the totalitarian excesses of the 20th century—the dictators, the show trials, the gulags, the killing fields, all of it.

Bespoke: Communism is an ancient phenomenon, perhaps as old as humans themselves. It is fundamentally a way of life and, as such, is rooted in human biology rather than philosophy, economics or ideology.

On Friday, President Trump was back at the Washington Hilton, the venue where, at the end of April, yet another crazed left-wing gunman tried—and failed—to end his life. The President was addressing the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference, and his remarks, aptly, focused on the threat to America from radical left-wingers hell-bent on destroying everything that is good and right and proper.

From communists, to use the President’s own words.

“This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion, 250 years ago,” Trump said.

“They will close your churches in this country, if they go communist, and they’re trying to. They will kill your people, and that’s what they’re about. They want to end religion, they have to end religion, because their ideology doesn’t work if you have strong religion.”

President Trump referred to the recent elections in New York, in which three radical candidates won their primary races thanks to endorsements from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has said he wants to “seize the means of production” and is proceeding with an agenda of rent and price controls, seizure of private property from landlords, and even race-based taxes for the city’s ever-dwindling white population.

“And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently, they’re communists; they’re not social democrats,” Trump said.

“They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”

Communism is “very easy to sell” as a proposition, President Trump continued, but its actual effects are always devastating.

“You’ll live in squalor, there will be no food, there will be no housing, there will be no military, there will be no law and order, there will be no nothing. You’ll be a third world inhabitant in every way. And everyone will suffer or die.”

So far, so good. Not a word out of place.

But then President Trump said something very interesting, very enigmatic. He said all those things we associate with communism today—the grand promises of freedom and happiness, the miserable, pathetic reality—have been “happening for thousands of years… by different names.”

Thousands of years? Different names? What on earth could President Trump mean?

When? What names?

He didn’t say.

President Trump later enlarged on that theme in a post on Truth Social, but again—speaking in riddles, leaving us to fill in the blanks.

“The Communists are finally making their move,” he wrote.

“I’ve been waiting and preparing for this for a long time. It’s easy to be a Communist—All you have to do is say, ‘I’ll give you everything’ but that means you’re taking it away from others that have earned it. Over thousands of years, that Ideology has not worked once. The game is on. Enjoy watching!”

Clearly, the President of the United States believes communism is not just an ideology or a political movement of the modern era, but something much older, much deeper, more fundamental. The obvious question is: Where did he get such an idea?

Has President Trump been reading the largely forgotten Lothrop Stoddard, and his 1922 book, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman? Stoddard believed the rising threat from anarchists and communists, which had already claimed the lives of multiple heads of state including President McKinley, was nothing less than the challenge of a biological underclass, a seething mass of freaks and failures whose sole power was their vast weight of numbers and their murderous hatred for the well-turned-out and successful. Such people have always existed, but modern conditions have multiplied their ranks enormously, so they now pose an existential threat to civilization itself.

Or perhaps the President has been reading something a bit more recent. How about the pseudonymous “neo-reactionary” writer Spandrell, and his famous essay, “Bioleninism”? According to Spandrell, Leninism as a political strategy—the creation of a vast “coalition of the fringes” to seize power—far predates Lenin himself, and can even be seen in populist movements from the ancient world, which promised to take the landed wealth of the aristocrats and optimates and redistribute it to the lower classes, the plebes.

Maybe Trump’s been reading Bronze Age Pervert, who contrasts the “yeast life” that defines most of humanity for most of history—undifferentiated reproduction, stifling conformity, rule by obese women and fearful old men, the communal slop pot and the smoke-filled longhouse—with life in the ascent, as represented by the mysterious Sea Peoples, the Greeks of the Agonal Age, and more recently men like Hernan Cortes and his conquistadores.

There’s even a slim chance President Trump has been reading my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which investigates the biological basis of political attitudes, especially the role of testosterone. Give a man a dose of testosterone, scientists tell us, and you’ll reliably increase his “parochial altruism”—his kindness towards members of his tribe, and aggression towards outsiders—as well as his comfort with “advantageous inequality,” which is science-speak for hierarchy and people getting different rewards on the basis of their competence. These are fundamental organizing principles of the difference between right-wingers and left-, keyed in at the level of a steroid molecule produced in the testes. On my account, the civilizational collapse in testosterone levels we’re seeing—about 1% year on year, across the Western world—is intimately tied to the continuing leftward drift of society, with all its terrible consequences.

Or perhaps Trump simply understands, on an intuitive level, that what drives leftism in its more radical forms cannot be ideology, at least not primarily, because no ideology can truly motivate people to hate so fervently, to want to overturn the natural order with such ferocity that they would murder pregnant women and children and even try to eradicate whole breeds of animal like the borzoi dog simply because of its association with their hated betters.

What drives communism is emotion, and those emotions are far, far older than Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto or anything that came out of the French Revolution. They are the emotions that drove Cain to murder Abel in the primal opening frames of Genesis: anger, resentment, envy, a deep sense of unworthiness, the desire for revenge and to have those things that have not been earned by the sweat of one’s own brow, simply because others have them and they are better than you and, worst of all, you know it.

Of course, this recognition doesn’t make defeating leftism any easier. For how can we truly defeat what is worst and lowest in man? President Trump, at least, seems to recognize the scale of the problem.

The game is on.