Trump Screams About Communism While Working Families Starve: The Oldest Trick in the Empire's Playbook

Donald Trump does not fear communism. He fears you learning why the word terrifies the men who own everything.

This weekend the President of the United States sat down and typed out a whimper about "loud and unattractive people" leading the Democratic Party toward the left. He called them "Dumocrats." He warned of a "sick, Communist ideology" swallowing America whole.

Let us be honest about what this is. A billionaire in a gold-plated tower is frightened that ordinary people are starting to ask why they cannot afford rent, insulin, or eggs. So he reaches for the panic button that his class has smashed for over a century. He screams the word that has always been used to keep the poor quiet and afraid.

The Word That Buries the Poor

They always say communism. They never say hunger.

When they scream about the reds, what they mean is that someone dared to suggest a farmworker deserves shade and water in a hundred degree field. What they mean is that a nurse should not die in debt for saving lives.

Go back and look at what the fear of the left actually purchased in this hemisphere. In 1954 the United States helped topple Guatemala's government because a man named Jacobo Arbenz wanted to give unused land to peasants who had nothing. The United Fruit Company owned that land and did not want to lose it.

What followed was thirty six years of civil war. Entire Mayan villages wiped off the map. Mothers pulled from their homes at night. Children who never grew old enough to learn the word politics.

Here is something few in the north ever hear. The CIA printed lists of people to be eliminated before Arbenz even fell. The killing was planned like a grocery order.

The Boots Were Always American

Ask a grandmother in Santiago what September 11th means. She will not tell you about towers. She will tell you about 1973, when the tanks rolled and Salvador Allende died in the presidential palace while planes screamed overhead.

They stuffed thousands of people into a soccer stadium. The famous singer Victor Jara had his hands crushed by soldiers who mocked him and told him to play his guitar now. Then they shot him forty four times and dumped his body in the street.

Why? Because Chile elected a socialist who wanted copper profits to feed Chilean children instead of foreign shareholders.

The men who ordered these things wore suits in Washington. They smiled. They spoke of freedom while the blood ran into the drains of a stadium.

This is the history hiding inside Trump's little tantrum. When he snarls the word communist, he is standing on a mountain of corpses that his class built to protect its dividends.

In El Salvador they trained the soldiers who murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero at the altar as he raised the sacrament. He had begged them the day before to stop killing the poor. They answered him with a bullet during Mass.

Unattractive to Whom?

Trump called them loud and unattractive. Sit with that word. Unattractive.

The man who gold-plates his toilets is offended by the faces of people who work. He finds the calloused hands ugly. He finds the tired eyes distasteful. He wants his politics pretty and quiet and obedient.

But the poor have never been quiet when they finally understand who has been robbing them. That is the true source of the fear. Not gulags. Not red flags. Just the sound of working people counting the money that was stolen from their pockets and asking loudly where it went.

The affordability crisis is not a mystery. Wages sit still while landlords and pharmacy giants and grocery monopolies feast. And every time someone names the thief, the thief points at the horizon and screams communism.

It worked in Guatemala. It worked in Chile. It bought forty years of silence paid for in graves.

The question now is whether it still works here.

Trump is betting that the American worker is too tired, too distracted, and too afraid to notice the trick. He is betting you will look at the scary word instead of your empty refrigerator.

He may be right. The empire has won this bet before.

But something is changing. The loud and unattractive people are getting louder. And the men in the gold towers can smell it. That smell, that faint scent of a bill finally coming due, is the only thing that has ever made a tyrant reach for the panic button at five in the afternoon on a Saturday.

Let him keep screaming. The dead of a dozen countries are listening. And so, at last, are the living.