Bless His Little, Cholesterol-Clogged Heart
Break a Hip During Your Speech Tonight, Donnyboy!
The networks are sweating through their blazers this evening, wondering if they’re about to host a presidential address or a fire hazard.
As the 9:00 p.m. (Eastern) hour approaches, newsrooms are engaged in a tawdry, high-stakes game of chicken: do you carry a presidential speech when you know with near-certainty that the event will likely become a fountain of debunked conspiracy theories? It’s a delicate balance between the “public’s right to know” and the sobering reality that airing a pervert, sex-pest president who’s made the truth a secondary concern carries a hefty price tag in both liability and credibility.
Still, as we wait for the teleprompter to roll and Trump to comically ignore it, one thing is certain: it’ll be a minor miracle if he manages to get through his “big announcement” without deploying his new-found favorite all-purpose cudgel—the word “communist”—before he’s finished bloviating.
Donald Trump has, after all, dusted off one of America’s most exhausted political traditions. It isn’t democracy, nor liberty, and it certainly isn’t reading. No, he’s revived the time-honored practice of lobbing labels so inflammatory that the audience forgets there was ever an actual policy issue to discuss.
Today’s magic word is “communist.”
It’s the Swiss Army knife of political paranoia. Universal health care? Communist. A union contract? Communist. A request for a living wage? That’s not capitalism; that’s the Red Army marching on your front porch. If a public library dared to circulate a book on botany, it would surely be denounced as a Marxist propaganda cell—after all, those books are just sitting there, being shared. Sounds suspiciously collective, doesn’t it?
Give it another month, and we’ll be told your neighbor’s lawn sprinkler is a Marxist irrigation device, distributing water according to the needs of the hydrangeas rather than the dictates of the free market.
This isn’t innovation; it’s an inheritance. It’s the political equivalent of putting a piece of duct tape over your car’s “Check Engine” light that simply reads “COMMUNIST.” It doesn’t fix the engine, but it may stop the naïve driver from dwelling on the knocking sound under the hood.
The strategy is a masterclass in intellectual laziness. If you have to defend why insulin costs the price of a mid-sized sedan, or why a hedge-fund manager pays a lower tax rate than a kindergarten teacher, you’re forced to engage in that tedious thing called “governance.” But if you announce that anyone seeking to regulate your behavior is a secret operative of the Kremlin? Discussion over. Somebody pass the potato salad.
Trump didn’t invent this routine; he just found it in the attic and began swinging it around like a toddler who just discovered his grandfather’s ceremonial cavalry saber.
The historical continuity here is almost impressive. Before the Civil War, the plantation aristocracy didn’t bother debating the morality of human bondage; they simply branded any critic an “abolitionist” or a “traitor to the race.” When the Confederacy folded and the census data started including people who hadn’t been considered people before, the labels shifted to “scalawag,” “carpetbagger,” and “nigger-lover.” The goal was always the same: turn a policy disagreement into a loyalty test.
By the mid-20th century, the target for the “commie” label was anyone who thought a child deserved a school lunch or a river shouldn’t catch fire. If you stood in the way of a corporate bottom line, you were a suspected agent of Moscow.
The irony, of course, is that the modern Democratic Party bears about as much resemblance to Soviet-style communism as an Olive Garden does to the Roman Empire. Lenin would have lasted roughly six minutes at a DNC platform meeting before dying of a massive aneurysm induced by the sheer, agonizing tedium of subcommittee procedure.
But accuracy was never the goal. The accusation isn’t about economics; it’s about othering. It’s a way of transforming a political opponent from a fellow citizen into a contaminant. By declaring your neighbor a “vermin” or an “enemy from within,” you’re relieved of the burden of civic debate. You aren’t arguing for a vision of the country; you’re playing the role of a desperate gardener weeding a patch that refuses to be manicured.
And so, here we are in the summer of 2026. Trump continues to rummage through the bargain bin of American demagoguery, delighted to discover the labels—though faded and fraying at the edges—still have their original price tags attached.
History doesn’t always repeat itself. Sometimes, it just recycles its oldest, grimiest bumper stickers.
So bless that senile, fat fuck’s little, cholesterol-clogged heart. Break a hip, er leg, Donnyboy.
