Trump: Socialism Is Coming

It appears that the Trump campaign has settled on rallying a conservative-libertarian coalition of elderly people with fearmonging about “socialism”:

“President Donald Trump has enlisted his senior economic advisers to flesh out one of his early 2020 presidential campaign themes: Socialism is coming.

In recent months, traditionally staid official White House economic reports and briefings have begun to emphasize the potentially massive costs of an ambitious socialist agenda and warn that America could transform into a Cold War dystopia.

While last year’s Economic Report to the President, a congressionally mandated annual summary of the state of the economy, didn’t once mention “socialism,” the word appears more than 100 times in this year’s 700-page-plus tome. The 2019 report, released earlier this week, features an entire chapter on the subject, which includes a recounting of the economic fallout from socialist experiments in China, the Soviet Union and Cuba. …”

“The socialism versus capitalism message is a home run with every group apart from millennials,” said one informal adviser to the campaign. “The campaign will cast 2020 through the prism of socialism versus freedom.”

This is going to do two things:

1.) It is an attempt to woo back the Mitt Romney voters in the suburbs who abandoned the GOP in the 2018 midterms. It won’t work because they will still believe Trump is an idiot.

2.) It will push away younger voters and populist voters who roll their eyes at that rhetoric.

Much of this depends on who wins the Democratic nomination. If it is a fanatic like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris, it will be much easier to make the “socialism” pitch to moderate voters. They are obviously hoping that Bernie Sanders is the nominee. Then it will be another battle of elderly people trying to relive the 1980s.

Their biggest problem right now is that younger voters don’t believe in free-market capitalism. They want a more equitable division of wealth. These people have only the vaguest idea what “socialism” actually is and for them it means not capitalism. It is easy to see how Yang’s pitch of “$1,000 bucks a month” is going to catch on with them. That’s what they really want, not an end to capitalism per se, but a more benevolent capitalism than we have gotten under mainstream conservatism.