You must love our country. […] as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism. There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country […] It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11. […] It killed 100 million people just in the last century alone. […] You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who pedal Marx’s lies about our heritage, who tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors. They’re doing something much worse than slandering our past […] So on the eve of this 250th anniversary of American heritage, we resolve and swear for all to hear that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly. […] America will never be a communist country. […] But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the Save America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years. […] The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.
–Trump on Communism at Mount Rushmore, July 3, 2026
When Donald Trump stood beneath the granite gaze of Mount Rushmore and vowed to “defeat communism again,” he was not speaking history, geopolitics, or philosophy. The declaration was a rhetorical séance: summoning a demon never truly exorcised, refighting a war never actually won, and projecting a binary onto a nation that abandoned such zero-sum framing half a century ago. But more than that, it was a performance of punitive power, a script inherited from a lineage of fixers and blackmailers whose real currency was leverage.
The official spin, of course, insists he wasn’t targeting Beijing or Havana, though he continues to blockade Cuba and rattle chips at China. No, we’re told his actual quarry was New York City Mayor Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist whom Trump has labeled a communist, questioned the citizenship of, and condemned as pro-Palestinian to the point of implying he is an anti-American foreign agent. Cast as foils, the two men are less genuine adversaries than complicit reflections, like Jacob and Esau, each sustaining the other’s relevance in a theater of perpetual grievance and performative political theater. Other MAGA faithful point their finger at other “newcomers” as well: Piker and AOC, even Kamala Harris and Obama. Yet to reduce the Rushmore address to mere mayoral mudslinging or counting it as a coup against Mamdani is to miss the obvious ghost lurking just off camera.
That ghost is Roy Cohn. Trump’s mentor in the 1970s and ‘80s (first hired by the family when they were sued for housing discrimination), Cohn bequeathed to his protégé more than a mantra (“never apologize, never admit a mistake, always retaliate”). He handed down mannerisms: the pacing, the menacing stares, the intimidating silences. During Trump’s first term, when government lawyers balked at playing fixer, he reportedly exclaimed, “Where is my Roy Cohn?” The question betrayed a presidency perpetually reaching for a counselor who specialized in turning the laws and enemies into weapons and enemies.
As chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Cohn perfected that trade. He played a decisive role in sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, exploiting the public’s conflation of communism with Jewishness to destroy a family that shared his own heritage, using testimony he privately knew was likely perjured, and he purged suspected communists from government while hiding his own closeted life, persecuting in others what he feared in himself. For Cohn, “communist” was never a coherent ideological threat; it was a flexible indictment, a death-writ for anyone whose destruction would consolidate his own power. That playbook (smear, retaliate, never flinch) did not retire with his death from AIDS in 1986. It metastasized into a parallel infrastructure of sexual leverage, one where Jeffrey Epstein emerged as the modern avatar.
The connections between Cohn and Epstein are not familial but operational. Both have been described by partisan investigators as key figures in overlapping networks of sexual blackmail and child trafficking, originating in the 1950s with mob-linked fixers: Cohn running its early iteration, Epstein presiding over its contemporary flowering. Both allegedly supplied minors to influential men, accumulating kompromat as currency. And both, notably, served as influential mentors to Donald Trump, teaching him that fame, ruthlessness, and secrecy could insulate a man from any reckoning.
They were wrong, and yet, this is the legacy Trump carries to Mount Rushmore, whether he acknowledges it or not. The man who thunders against communism learned his craft from a closeted inquisitor who sent Jews to the electric chair to prove his own loyalty, and from a trafficker who weaponized the bodies of children to secure the silence of the powerful. To stand beneath those four granite faces and summon the ghost of the Cold War is not only to misread history; it is to perform a kind of confession, projecting outward what he cannot afford to examine within. The rhetoric of anti-communism has always served, for Trump, as a screen: first for Cohn’s corruption, then for Epstein’s predation, and now for his own.
When Trump invokes Cold War rhetoric at Rushmore, simultaneously tightening the blockade on Cuba and needling Beijing as the Communist Party of China marks its 105th anniversary, the provocation is anything but narrowly domestic. The attack on Mamdani may have been the proximate trigger, as his supporters allege, but the echoes carry across oceans. Beijing and Havana recognize the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt’s imperial swagger, now filtered through McCarthy’s chief inquisitor. What Trump frames in part as a domestic culture skirmish is, in effect, a declaration of unfinished business, one that demands a larger response, precisely because his enemies, real and invented, were never meant to understand it narrowly.
Trump’s invocation of a second defeat presupposes a first. This is the cornerstone of a certain American exceptionalism, and it is historically untenable. The Soviet Union was not conquered; it corroded. Economic sclerosis, ethnic fractures, bureaucratic petrification, and the hemorrhaging quagmire of Afghanistan drained it from within. It was an implosion, not a knockout; a suicide, not a homicide. To claim victory over the USSR is to mistake a drowning man for a conquered foe.
The Cold War ended not with an American march on Moscow, but with a whimper in the Kremlin. Gorbachev’s twin gambits, perestroika and glasnost, were intended as resuscitation, not surrender, meant to salvage a foundering system by loosening its joints. But reforms, once they pass a structural tipping point, become revolution by other means, and the Soviet edifice crumbled under its own loosened weight.
Yet even if we momentarily grant the dubious trophy of 1991, what fell was a state, not a spirit. Communism did not expire. It remains the official ideology of Beijing, Hanoi, Havana, and Vientiane. It runs state governments in India, anchors parliamentary blocs in Nepal, and organizes labor movements across the Global South. As a philosophical tradition, it continues to animate academic inquiry, anti-colonial resistance, and critiques of global capital that grow only more urgent with each successive crisis of inequality. To claim the United States “defeated” communism is to claim it defeated algebra. The boast betrays not a memory of triumph, but a catastrophic failure of political imagination, a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the thing it pretends to have vanquished.
The most glaring omission in Trump’s historical imagination is the Sino-Soviet split, a rupture that rendered his binary obsolete long before he entered politics. Beginning in the late 1950s and solidifying by the end of the 1960s, the schism irrevocably fractured the global communist movement. When Richard Nixon touched down in Beijing in 1972, he was not meeting the high priest of a monolithic bloc; he was meeting a civilization-state that had already rejected the Soviet model of revolutionary export and command economics, and was quietly charting its own course.
That course would culminate in the reforms of the late 1970s, a fundamental rejection of zero-sum ideological struggle. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was never a rhetorical flourish; it was a declaration of independence from the very binary Trump now insists on resurrecting. In short, China is not the USSR of the 1990s. It is not a drowning man.
To appreciate the divergence, one must historicize properly. Consider 1979. In a single year, three catastrophic failures converged upon the Soviet Union: the disastrous overreach into Afghanistan; Premier Alexei Kosygin’s final, feckless attempt at economic decentralization, which, smothered by entrenched bureaucratic interests, paradoxically left the economy more centralized than before; and an economic implosion that saw GDP growth slide from 7.4% (1966–1970) to just 3.6% (1981–1985), even as Slavic birthrates cratered and Central Asian populations surged, straining ethnic cohesion to its limits. 1979 was not the year the symptoms appeared; it was the year the diagnosis became irreversible. By the time Gorbachev assumed office in 1985, the system was no longer amenable to reform: it was a corpse that hadn’t yet stopped twitching. Any palliative would have failed, because the rot was total.
In Beijing, and just months earlier, the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee, held in December 1978, had inaugurated China’s Reform and Opening-Up era. The contrast could not be starker. Domestically, the dismantling of the commune system in favor of the “household responsibility system” unleashed productive energies in the countryside that had been shackled for a generation. Internationally, the establishment of special economic zones (Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen) turned coastal backwaters into laboratories for market experimentation, attracting early investment from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. The strategy was deliberate, gradual, and almost Taoist in its patience: crossing the river by feeling the stones. This methodology avoided the shock-therapy catastrophes that befell other transition economies, building institutional capacity step by step rather than imploding in a single winter of discontent.
Today, China is not merely a resurgent power; it is a comprehensive peer competitor to the United States across economic, technological, and military domains, more formidable, in absolute terms, than the Soviet Union at its apogee. Some will hesitate at such a claim: after all, the Soviets defeated Nazism, a monumental achievement, but did so with considerable help from the US while the Chinese Red Army tied up Japan in China. And let us not forget, the Chinese, in the 1950s, fought the United States to an armistice in Korea and enabled Hanoi’s victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. In short, China was already a great power in the 1950s and held its own against the USSR during a border war in 1969. But those were contests of a bipolar era. The present competition operates via hypersonic glide vehicles, drone swarms, railguns, space-based deterrence, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and dominance over the global rare-earths supply chain, strategic terrain where Washington finds itself uncomfortably outflanked.
Yet the United States, unable to impose its will on anyone beyond its most pliant allies, has consistently refused to update its mental map. For decades, American foreign policy has been trapped in a time warp, projecting Cold War anxieties onto a China that moved on decades ago. Today’s Beijing is not an ideological crusader seeking global revolution with itself at the vanguard; it is a nation-state pursuing domestic stability, economic development, and a multipolar world order, goals that, ironically, align far more with classical realism than with Marxist internationalism. To view it through the lens of 1950s McCarthyism is not merely anachronistic; it is willful self-deception, a strategic myopia that mistakes a complex rival for a cardboard cutout of an expired enemy.
If the historical and philosophical pillars of Trump’s rhetoric are crumbling, its political function is perfectly transparent. The “greatest threat” framing is a classic diversionary tactic, as old as power itself. When inflation gnaws at household budgets, when healthcare bankrupts families, when bridges collapse and the border remains a political sieve, it is far easier for a beleaguered incumbent to conjure a foreign bogeyman than to repair the structural rot at home. At Rushmore that bogeyman wore the face of Mamdani; more often, Trump counts on the CPC to serve as his foil.
Trump’s unfulfilled domestic promises are a litany of broken pledges. The manufacturing renaissance he promised never arrived; the wall remains a monument to executive failure rather than a barrier; the economic revival sputters inconsistently at best; and the vow to avoid costly, self-defeating wars rings hollow against his own record of military brinkmanship and strategic blunder against Iran. By labeling communism as the “greatest threat,” Trump externalizes these deficiencies with ruthless efficiency. The message to his base is unequivocal: Your anxiety is not my failing; it is the sabotage of a sinister foreign ideology.
This rhetorical scaffolding also provides retroactive cover for protectionist policies that could not withstand diplomatic scrutiny. If China were merely a strategic competitor, one might engage in calibrated tariffs and quiet diplomacy. But an existential ideological enemy justifies every excess: decoupling entire supply chains, imposing blanket technology bans, and tearing up the rulebook of global trade. These become not acts of economic self-harm, but patriotic crusades: a war fought not on foreign battlefields, but in boardrooms and laboratories, sold to an anxious public as the righteous defense of a besieged nation, rather than what they so often are: a self-defeating trade war dressed in the robes of moral clarity. And yet he cuts deals with China because he must.
The bipolar catechism of the Cold War is not merely outdated; it is actively counterproductive. The world no longer orbits two opposing suns; it is a constellation of competing interests, overlapping alliances, and deep economic interdependence that defies the binary Trump insists upon reviving. The Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) is not waiting to choose between Washington and Beijing. It wants paved roads, functioning hospitals, and direct investment, escape routes from the extraction economies of the colonial and post-colonial eras. By forcing a binary choice, Trump does not rally these nations; he repels them, pushing them inexorably toward the very multipolarity that diminishes American influence.
More critically, this rhetoric misidentifies the actual threats of the twenty-first century. Climate collapse, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and financial contagion respect no borders and obey no ideological scripts. They are transnational by nature, and they demand cooperative frameworks, not adversarial postures, not Manichean crusades. To reduce China to an existential enemy is to forfeit the very collaboration required to address these material crises, squandering opportunities for joint action on issues that will define the century regardless of who occupies the White House.
Beneath the bluster of Mount Rushmore lies a question the speech dared not ask, and one that Trump’s rhetoric carefully obscures: if the United States cannot work with the world’s second-largest economy to secure its own economic stability, manage global health risks, and avert ecological catastrophe, can it really afford to save itself at all?
Trump is not a protector; he is a declinist clinging to a fantasy. But the “communist threat” he invokes is not a geopolitical diagnosis; it is a projection of his own inadequacy, a shadow cast on the wall to distract from the empty room behind him. That projection, however, is not original to Trump. It is a hand-me-down from Roy Cohn, whose oldest playbook reads: never argue the merits, always assassinate the character. When Trump labels Mamdani a communist, questions his citizenship, and implies treason, he is not engaging in political debate. He is performing Cohn’s signature move: reducing a complex opponent to a single, disposable epithet, fit for public destruction. When he repeats the oft-told lie that communism killed 100 million people, he forgets to say that it raised 800 million out of poverty in China, or that communism’s enemies (fascism, capitalism, and imperialism) killed 150 million. Meanwhile, a 2025 report from the non-profit organization Choose Democracy estimates that policies implemented by Trump since he took office in January 2025 are linked to at least 600,000 deaths worldwide by November of last year, a figure that even then was marked as a minimum floor value rather than a full count.
The line from Cohn to Trump is well-trodden, but it does not end there. Cohn’s network of extortion and blackmail, supplying leverage over powerful men through compromised secrecy, found its modern heir in Jeffrey Epstein. Both men served as mentors to Trump, teaching him the same cold calculus: power immunizes, secrets are currency, and the state exists to serve the man, never the reverse. To stand on a mountainside and thunder against “communism” is to invite the public gaze outward, precisely so it never looks backward: toward the trafficking, the blackmail, the unpunished corruption that shadows his career like a second skin.
Rushmore, then, is the perfect stage for this sleight of hand. Carved into sacred land, it enshrines a narrative of American exceptionalism that has always been more myth than reality: four faces chosen less for virtue than for conquest, expansion, and, in two cases, human bondage. By planting himself beneath their granite stare, Trump grafts his fading political career onto the permanence of stone, auditioning for a fifth face he has openly coveted. Geologists warn there is no stable rock left to carve another visage; the mountain is crumbling, unfit for further chiseling. It is a fitting metaphor. Add the contemporary personification of American oligarchy to a slave owner, a lackey of industrial capital, and an unrepentant imperialist, and we have bookends that complete a monument not to liberty, but to the very predation that Cohn and Epstein perfected in the shadows.
Ideology cannot be defeated; it evolves, migrates, and endures. But a nation can defeat itself: by refusing to see the world as it is, by mistaking a complex multipolar rival for a cardboard cutout of a dead enemy, and by elevating leaders who learned statecraft not from diplomats or economists, but from fixers and traffickers. The real “greatest threat” to America is not a red menace from across the Pacific. It is the decay of its own political institutions, the rising tide of inequality, and the willingness of its leaders to sacrifice truth for power, all while asking, as Trump once did, “Where is my Roy Cohn?”
The answer, it seems, is always there, standing behind him, whispering the same old lines, and pointing at a shadow that was never there to begin with.