OPEN LETTER · 45047 · IN PRINT

Hey Trump — let's call it what it is.

For a week, ever since a slate of candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept three Democratic House primaries — ousting two incumbents — the President has had exactly one word for it: communist. Godless communists. A cancer. The greatest threat to the country since its founding. Fix News has run it as a socialist sweep night after night, and the Speaker of the House says communism is now “on our own shores.” Here is what the word is hiding. The platform on the ballot is democratic socialism — a rent freeze, public child care, more government inside a democracy you can still vote out — which is not communism, and calling it that is exactly how the charge bounces off. But one of the winners, Darializa Avila Chevalier, has a documented history of praising the actual article — Marx, Lenin, even Stalin, in her own deleted posts. So this is a letter to the President about precision: about the difference between the lie he's telling on fifty million people and the true thing he could say about one.

By Michael · June 29, 2026

Mr. President —

I'm going to do something nobody around you has bothered to do this week: I'm going to take your word seriously. For seven days you've had exactly one word for what happened in the New York primaries, and you have not been shy with it. So before I tell you what's wrong with it, let me make sure I've got it right — here it is, in your own mouth, from this week alone.

· WHERE YOU AND FIX NEWS SAID IT ·

— “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country.” — your Truth Social, the morning after the primaries. — “Hardcore, godless communists.” A “cancer … permeating our country called communism.” — to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, June 26. — “Animals.” “The greatest threat to our country since its founding.” “They will kill your people.” — same week, same theme. — “I think I'd be the greatest communist in history.” — June 26, riffing on New York's rent freeze. — And the echo behind you: Speaker Mike Johnson says communism is “on our own shores,” and Fix News has run it as a “socialist sweep” night after night.

Now here's the trouble, and it's a simple one. You're using a single word for two different things, and they are not the same thing — they're barely related. One of them is what's actually on the ballot in New York. The other is what you keep saying it is. Lay them next to each other and the gap is the whole story.

· TWO THINGS, ONE WORD — THE PART YOU'RE BLURRING ·

What is actually on the ballot — democratic socialism: — Wins power by election, and has to stand for re-election; if the city hates the rent freeze, it votes the rent freeze out. — Leaves private property and private business standing; it taxes them, regulates them, and builds public things next to them — housing, child care, transit. — Its real-world cousins are Denmark and Norway — and your own Social Security and Medicare. A thicker safety net inside a democracy, not a new country. What you are naming it — communism, the Lenin-and-Stalin kind: — Seizes the means of production: the state takes the factories, the farms, the homes; private business is abolished, not taxed. — One party. There is no voting it out — the revolution does not stand for re-election. — The receipts are the Soviet Union and Mao's China: tens of millions dead, by famine and by force. One is more government inside a democracy you can fire. The other is no private property and no democracy left to fire. A rent freeze is the first thing. Lenin is the second. They are not one word.

So when you call a rent freeze “communism,” it lands the way calling a parking ticket “the death penalty” would land — same general direction, wildly different thing, and everyone listening knows it. That's why the charge keeps bouncing off instead of sticking. But I promised to take your word seriously, so here is the part I'd actually be telling you if I were standing at that podium: you are not entirely wrong. You're aiming a true thing at the wrong target. Because there is someone in this story your word genuinely fits — and it's a person, not a party.

· NOW THE PART THAT'S TRUE — AND IT HAS A NAME ·

Darializa Avila Chevalier — who just beat twelve-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York's 13th: — A since-deleted account, 2020 to 2022, that CNN went back and pulled — with repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology, and Soviet figures including Lenin. — A profile bio that read, “how communist of you.” — Marx's “Capital” called “essential”; a complaint that the libraries didn't stock Lenin; a retweet praising Stalin's writings. — A campus group she helped lead, whose since-deleted manifesto said it was fighting for “the total eradication of Western civilization.” (New York Post) — She has since apologized for the posts and says she has grown. Put that in too — it's true, and it's the fair thing. That is not a tax rate or a vibe, sir. That is a person, under her own name, quoting Lenin approvingly. You do not have to invent a communist to point at. There is one on the ballot. Point at her.

So let's call it what it is, Mr. President — really call it, the way you said you wanted to. The honest sentence is not “the Democrats are communists,” and it's not “nobody on the left ever admired Lenin.” It's narrower than both, and truer than both: the platform is democratic socialism, which you are completely free to hate and completely free to beat at the ballot box — and one nominee has a documented record of praising the actual article, which she should have to own under her own name, on camera, in daylight.

What you did instead was take that one woman's paper trail and staple it to fifty million people. The nurse who just wants the rent to stop climbing. The kid who knocked doors for cheaper child care. The retiree who likes the idea of a bus that actually comes. You looked at all of them and said: Lenin. That is not calling it what it is. That is the exact opposite — taking one true thing and smearing it across millions of people it was never true about. And that move, sir — the blur — is the whole reason this paper exists.

Here's the tell, and you handed it to me yourself. You said you'd be “the greatest communist in history.” You were joking — but the joke gave you away, because you only joke like that about a word you've decided means nothing. You're treating “communist” as a paint can: something you can throw across a whole party because one of them earned a single drop of it. A word that can mean anybody means nobody. And the day it means nobody is the day it can no longer touch the one person it actually describes.

So here is the counsel from this desk, and it's the same one I give you on everything: precision beats volume. Name the nominee. Put her own posts on the screen — the bio, the Lenin line, the manifesto — and make her answer for them in her own voice. You would win that exchange clean, because it's true and it's hers. But the second you swap “this candidate's record” for “communist Democrats,” you've traded a fact you can prove for a slur you can't — and handed the other side the easiest three words in politics: no, we're not. You don't need the party. The party is what's making you lose an argument you ought to be winning.

Let's call it what it is. Democratic socialism where it's democratic socialism. Lenin where somebody actually quoted Lenin. And the fifty million people in between — the ones who never said any of it — left out of a fight that was never theirs. Say the name, sir. Drop the party. That's the whole letter.

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · 45047 · June 29, 2026

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★ The Hole

you don't have to invent a communist, mr. president. there's one on the ballot. name her — and leave the other fifty million out of it.

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