The man warning you about communism is the one seizing pieces of industry, the schools, the courts, and the press, which is the widest government takeover in modern American memory.
While he points at you or your neighbor and says communist, let’s take a close look at what his own government has spent the last eighteen months doing. It’s a government that buys pieces of private companies. A government that dictates what a university may teach. A government that decides which books you may read. A government that publishes a blacklist of reporters on its own website and prosecutes the President's personal enemies by name.
That is state power closing its hand. And it is not coming from the people he keeps pointing at.
Let me walk you through it, one example at a time. Every single one is on the public record.
One. The Government Now Owns Pieces of Private Companies.
Communism has one core idea. The state owns the means of production. The factories, the industries, the output belong to the government. Hold that thought, then look at what this administration built. It took a ten percent stake in Intel. It took roughly fifteen percent of the rare earth miner MP Materials and became its largest shareholder. It took stakes in Lithium Americas and Trilogy Metals. It secured a golden share in U.S. Steel that hands Washington a permanent veto over where the company builds, whether it moves work overseas, and which plants it closes. It cut itself in for a slice of Nvidia and AMD chip sales to China. The President's own economic adviser called the Intel deal a down payment on a government wealth fund and promised many more. The government of the United States now sits on the ownership rolls of American industry with the power to say no. There is a word for a state that owns and steers private business. He shouts it every day. He simply aims it at the wrong people.
Two. It Dictates What Universities May Teach.
The administration froze billions in research money to force elite universities to change how they run. Columbia paid two hundred and twenty one million dollars, took on an outside compliance monitor, agreed to end its diversity programs, to turn over admissions data, and to tighten scrutiny of international students, all to unfreeze its research money. Columbia insists it kept authority over its own hiring and curriculum, and the deal says so. Harvard refused the terms. It had more than two billion dollars in grants frozen after it rejected a government demand for an outside audit of the viewpoint diversity of its students and faculty. A federal judge ruled that freeze illegal and found that the administration had used the fight over antisemitism as a smokescreen for what the judge called an ideologically motivated assault on the country's leading universities. Washington did not have to win in court. It only had to freeze the money long enough to make a school bend. When a government withholds research funding until a university complies, it is reaching into the classroom.
Three. It Decides Which Books You May Read.
An executive order set the machinery in motion, and the results are on the shelves, or missing from them. Defense Department schools around the world pulled 596 titles. The Naval Academy stripped roughly 381 books from its Nimitz Library, including Maya Angelou's memoir and histories of the Holocaust and lynching. When an invited author prepared to criticize the purge in a lecture to midshipmen, the academy asked him to drop that part, and when he refused, they canceled him. A government deciding which books a reader may touch is not a footnote in the history of tyranny. It is a first chapter.
Four. It Publishes a Blacklist of Reporters on a Government Website.
The White House built a page at its own dot gov address and called it a media bias portal. It runs an Offender Hall of Shame. It names individual reporters and outlets, brands their work a lie or left wing lunacy, and asks the public to submit tips to keep the list current. Strip away the branding. A government office is maintaining a searchable, public register of journalists it has marked as enemies and inviting citizens to inform on more. That is not a press office. That is a state media registry, the kind of tool you expect from a regime, not a republic.
Five. It Prosecutes the President's Personal Enemies By Name.
The President went on his own platform and demanded that his Justice Department act now against James Comey and others. The department delivered. It indicted Comey. It indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James. A federal judge threw out both cases after finding that the prosecutor the President installed to bring them had been placed in the job unlawfully. Grand juries then refused to indict James again, twice. Around the edges, the administration opened investigations into Adam Schiff, into former CIA director John Brennan, into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over his testimony about the central bank's building renovation while the President was hammering him to cut interest rates, and into Fed governor Lisa Cook. The cases against the President's loudest critics collapsed in court. That is the tell. The machinery ran anyway, aimed by name, at people whose crime was standing in his way.
Six. It Bent the Biggest Networks With Lawsuits and License Threats.
Paramount, the parent of CBS, paid sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit legal scholars across the spectrum called frivolous. It settled while it needed the administration's Federal Communications Commission to approve a merger the company's owner had staked a fortune on. Disney's ABC paid fifteen million to settle a separate Trump suit. The FCC chair opened reviews of CBS, ABC, and NBC and moved against NPR and PBS. The lesson landed in every newsroom in the country. Cross the President and the government controls a chokepoint you have to pass through. That is how you tame a press without ever passing a censorship law.
Seven. It Dismantled the Government's Own Free Press and Locked Out the Rest.
The administration gutted the U.S. Agency for Global Media and put all thirteen hundred Voice of America staff on leave, then cut grants to Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, the outlets that carried real news into Iran, Russia, and North Korea. At home it banned the Associated Press from events for refusing to adopt the President's preferred name for a body of water. It stopped publishing transcripts of the President's remarks. It seized control of the daily press pool. The Pentagon demanded reporters sign a pledge to withhold even unclassified information, and nearly every major outlet refused and walked. Silence the messengers abroad, script the coverage at home.
Eight. It Scrubbed the Public Record.
As agencies raced to comply with the anti diversity orders, the Pentagon flagged or deleted tens of thousands of web pages. Among the casualties were material on the Holocaust, on September 11, and a page honoring Jackie Robinson. The department later admitted important history had been pulled by mistake and insisted that history is not diversity content. A government that edits the public record after the fact is deciding what the country is permitted to remember.
Nine. It Sent the Military Into American Cities.
The administration put National Guard troops on the streets of Washington and Los Angeles. Federal judges ruled that both deployments broke the law. The President pressed for troops in Chicago and Portland and floated invoking the Insurrection Act, a power no President has used since 1992, to put soldiers on American streets against Americans. Armies in your own cities, aimed at your own population, is the signature of the systems he claims to be protecting you from.
Ten. It Made War Without Congress, Again and Again.
The Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress, not to one man. He struck Iran's nuclear sites in June 2025 and struck Iran again in February 2026, both times without congressional authorization. He ordered the operation that seized Venezuela's president in January 2026 without asking Congress at all. His forces destroyed more than thirty vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific and killed roughly a hundred and fifteen people, on a legal theory outside experts call unlawful. He bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. Congress tried to reassert its war power and folded every time. The framers gave that power to the legislature precisely to stop one man from marching the country into war on his own word. He does it on his own word.
Eleven. It Threatened Critics With Prison and Death.
When several lawmakers, including a retired Navy captain, told service members they may refuse illegal orders, the President branded them seditious and posted that their behavior was punishable by death. He amplified a post that called for them to be hanged. He told reporters chasing a leak to give up the source or go to jail. Naming your political opponents and pairing them with the words death and prison is how frightened regimes talk, not free ones.
Twelve. It Punished the States That Vote the Wrong Way.
During the government shutdown, the President's budget chief began clawing back federal funding for projects in Democratic states like New York and California, and the President said out loud that programs he opposed were never coming back. Turning the national Treasury into a loyalty test, rewarding the states that bow and starving the ones that resist, is control dressed up as budgeting.
Real Communism, In Plain English.
The state owns the industries. One party rules. The press answers to the government. Critics are investigated, jailed, or worse. The state decides which books you read and what your children are taught in school. The state edits the record and puts soldiers in the streets.
Now read back up this page.
Every one of those lines describes something his own government has already done. The nurse who wants healthcare did not seize a single company. The mayor who wants cheaper buses did not blacklist a single reporter or prosecute a single enemy. He did all of it. Then he stood in front of the flag on the Fourth of July and called the other side communists.
What You Do Now.
Stop letting one word do your thinking for you. The next time you hear communist thrown at a teacher, a nurse, a mayor, or someone in your own family, answer with the list. The stakes in Intel and U.S. Steel. The books pulled off the shelves. The reporters named on a government website. The enemies dragged before grand juries. Say it out loud, because the list is real and the fear is not.
Talk to your people. Your parents, your kids, the neighbor who repeats the word with no idea where it came from. Give them the history so the word loses its grip. -Mitch Jackson via Facebook
