Start with a document most Americans have never heard of.
National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 was signed in September 2025. It directs the federal counterterrorism apparatus to prioritize investigations of people and organizations displaying certain characteristics, and it lists them. Anti-Americanism. Anti-capitalism. Anti-Christianity. Support for the overthrow of the government. Extremism on migration, race, and gender. And hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
Read that list again as what it is, which is not a description of conduct. Every item is a belief. Not an act, not a plan, not a threat. A political opinion, listed in a national security directive as an indicator that a person may commit terrorism.
The memorandum does not mention the First Amendment. It also does not mention January 6, 2021, which remains the largest incident of organized domestic political violence in modern American history.
It was reportedly drafted under the direction of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff who is not an attorney and has no background in law enforcement.
Now set that beside what the president has been saying every day for the past two months, and the picture assembles itself.
The Campaign
After a slate of Democratic Socialists of America candidates won primaries in New York this summer, defeating two incumbents, Donald Trump announced that the Communists are finally making their move, and added that he had been waiting and preparing for this.
He has called the mayor of New York City a hundred percent Communist Lunatic. He has warned of godless communists who will attack all religions but in particular Christianity. At Mount Rushmore on the Fourth of July he promised America would never be a communist country. His press secretary framed the midterms as a choice between communism and common sense. The Speaker of the House posted a cartoon of New York City strewn with hammers and sickles and declared that we will not let MINI MAMDANIs take over the greatest nation in the history of the world, and elsewhere called the primary results the Bolshevik Revolution of 2026.
The accuracy of the charge is not in serious dispute among people who study this. Reuters noted that democratic socialists pursue change through elections and democratic institutions, while communism has historically meant one-party state control. PolitiFact has repeatedly rated the equation false. Zohran Mamdani, asked directly on CNN whether he is a communist, said no, he is a democratic socialist, and has said so every time he is asked.
None of that matters, and it was never supposed to. The label is not a claim about anyone’s economics. It is an assignment.
Roy Cohn Is Not a Metaphor
Every piece written about this reaches for McCarthy, and the comparison is apt, but it is usually offered as an analogy. It is not an analogy. There is a person connecting the two events.
Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, the man who ran the mechanics of the operation, who conducted the interrogations and built the lists and understood better than anyone alive how to destroy a career with an accusation that required no evidence, was Roy Cohn.
Roy Cohn later became Donald Trump’s lawyer and his mentor. He taught him the method directly, in person, over years: attack first, deny everything, never apologize, and above all understand that the accusation itself is the weapon, and that whether it is true is a separate question that will arrive too late to matter.
The line from the first Red Scare to this one runs through a single man who worked for both.
What the First One Actually Did
Because the Red Scare has receded into a phrase, it is worth recalling what it consisted of.