At this year’s Fourth of July celebration, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Donald Trump devoted part of his speech to an attack on “communism.” Sounding a note from an earlier era of the nation’s history, he hissed about the “communist menace,” which he called “a mortal threat to American liberty,” a “cancer” that needs to be “cut out,” and “the greatest threat to our country.” Trump never explicitly said which “communists” posed this threat in 2026, but the con