Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of ‘communist menace’

Trump delivers a speech in Philadelphia in 2016. Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, became Trump’s mentor in later decades. Photograph: Mark Makela/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Trump delivers a speech in Philadelphia in 2016. Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, became Trump’s mentor in later decades. Photograph: Mark Makela/Getty Images Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of ‘communist menace’ President harks back to red scare of his childhood to attack US left – but will such language resonate beyond Maga base? Perhaps above all else, Donald Trump is a child of the cold war. Three months before the US president was born, Winston Churchill delivered a historic speech in Fulton, Missouri, that ushered in a generations-long existential struggle between western capitalism and Soviet communism. Lamenting the spread of Soviet communism across eastern Europe following the allied victory in the second world war, Churchill – by then no longer British prime minister – warned his audience on 5 March 1946 that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent”. It was the prelude to a nuclear-armed standoff between Washington and Moscow that triggered a hysteria-driven “red scare” in the US – leading to the execution of convicted spies and exemplified by witch-hunts instigated by the Republican senator Joe McCarthy , who claimed he had obtained lists of communist agents working in the state department and other key areas of American life. The hunt for communists would have been a ubiquitous theme of Trump’s early childhood. Strikingly, Roy Cohn – McCarthy’s chief counsel, who had masterminded the federal prosecution of the convicted Soviet spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg , subsequently executed for treason – became Trump’s mentor in later decades, as he rose in the New York real-estate world. “For many years, communism and communists were the major enemy of the United States,” said Harvey Klehr, an emeritus professor at Emory University and an expert in the US’s history with communism. “There were obviously times it might have gotten exaggerated or or got out of hand, but there was a darn good reason for people to be alarmed about it.” Paranoia waned in relative terms after McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954, but only abated after the collapse of eastern European communist regimes in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later. Now, 37 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war, Trump is reviving it. In a series of high-profile addresses, Trump has identified an ideology that millions of Americans are too young to recall as the US’s biggest threat. “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 who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said in a speech at Mount Rushmore on 3 July, on the eve of the U