Donald Trump has targeted “communists” and “Marxists,” threatening to bar them from the US if he wins his bid to retake the White House in 2024.
Speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference, Trump evoked memories of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare’ a period of intense anti-communist suspicion and persecution in the US.
The Republican former president, who is making another bid in 2024, said “We’re going to keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”
The plan echoes Trump’s widely criticised travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries during his first term. This policy was widely condemned as anti-Muslim and was later overturned by President Joe Biden.
Trump’s attacks on left-wing ideologies have accelerated in recent weeks, as the ex-president carries on campaigning despite his ongoing legal challenges. In what is becoming a feature of his stock speech, Trump warned that Biden’s America could soon become a “tyrannical Marxist nation.”
Hours after pleading not guilty in federal court on, Trump told a crowd of his supporters: “If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me.”
Who would be affected by a ban?
Any such ban would most likely primarily impact China, which has tens of millions of Communist Party members, many of whom are government officials and leading business people.
In 2020, the New York Times reported that Trump was considering a ban targeting the Chinese communist party. The Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said “If that is true, I think that is utterly pathetic.”
Any ban threatens to significantly upset US-China relations.
Trump’s messaging has been echoed by his fellow Republicans.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene brands Democrats ‘corrupt communists,’ while Trump’s closest rival for the nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has consistently attacked “cultural Marxism” — an anti-semitic conspiracy theory that came to prominence after World War II when America had an influx of Jewish refugees, some of whom were left-wing.
The US has a long history of politicians branding their opponents Marxist. Most notoriously, Senator Joseph McCarthy drove efforts to blacklist accused communists in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Trump’s growing Hispanic support
Trump’s anti-Communist rhetoric indicates a strategy aimed at winning over non-white voters, some of whom have an aversion to communism since they’ve come from countries like Vietnam, Venezuela and Cuba.
Trump, who notoriously launched his first campaign with an attack on Mexican migrants, represents a party with growing support from the Hispanic community. The Republicans earned 28 percent of Hispanic votes in 2016 and approximately 32 percent in 2020.
Latin America also has a history of anti-Communist activism and violence, some of which have been supported by the US, and has fed into modest but growing phenomenon described by scholars as the “multiracial far right.”
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The complexity of the issue was detailed by Cristina Beltran, an associate professor who studies race and the right at New York University.
Beltran told The Guardian, “Latinos have always existed as a population that’s both been under assault and also been brought into practices of racial domination.”
White supremacist figurehead Nick Fuentes is part Mexican, while Enrique Tarrio, is an Afro-Cuban is a former leader of the neofascist group the Proud Boys. Earlier this year Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy concerning the January 6 attack on the US capitol.
Mauricio Garcia, who self-identified as Hispanic, killed eight people at an outlet mall near Dallas earlier this year; during his attack, he wore clothes emblazoned with the initials RWDS, standing for the slogan “Right Wing Death Squad.”
Is it legal?
Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less migration to the US, said the law already prohibits those who are members of a Communist Party from becoming naturalised citizens or green card holders.
Citing a law from 1918, Arthur told AP News that anyone “who is or has been a member of or affiliated with the Communist or any other totalitarian party (or subdivision or affiliate thereof), domestic or foreign, is inadmissible.”
The over-a-century-old law was introduced as the Soviet Union was taking shape and during a time of widespread labour disputes in the US, often pitting self-described communists, socialists and anarchists against Washington.
The prohibition doesn’t currently apply to someone who wants to visit the US, including those on tourist visas or students.
Trump said he intends to bar “all communists and all Marxists” under Section 212(f) of US immigration law. This law grants the president broad authority to bar non-US citizens if their entry would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Trump invoked this law to implement his controversial travel ban, which was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.
Arthur notes that the legal precedent set by the Supreme Court in the travel ban case could potentially allow for the new policy. The court’s ruling at the time was that the ban was within the US president’s authority over immigration and responsibility to keep the nation safe.
But Bill Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, noted that the Supreme Court’s approval of Trump’s travel ban was contingent on the Trump administration checking with embassies that individuals from the banned countries would not pose a threat to the country.
“You have to have some justification,” Hing told AP.
Allen Orr, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, concurred. He noted that the travel ban that reached the Supreme Court included a “whole list of exceptions.”
“It’s not a blanket ban if there are a ton of exceptions,” Orr argued.
As the US edges closer to the 2024 election, Trump’s proposed ban on communists and Marxists is stirring considerable debate. This contentious proposal, much like many facets of Trump’s political career, is as provocative as it is divisive, highlighting a stark polarisation in American politics.
