President Trump‘s (Trump) efforts to counter the Communist Party, its proxies and other communists have become a central part of his legacy in the White House over the past four years of his administration.
From this perspective, the slogan “America First” is an appropriate slogan for combating communist opponents and the various causes with which communism has collaborated in its decades-long attempts to supplant the United States.
The Communist Party spent decades plundering America’s wealth through the theft of trade secrets, protectionist trade policies and market distortions. And proceeded to use that wealth to fund a massive soft power campaign to undermine U.S. interests in a variety of areas in order to gain influence over multinational institutions.
Despite major disruptions from within the federal government, Trump has confronted this threat directly in the United States, in China, and around the world. When he announced his re-election campaign in 2019, communism and freedom became one of the key themes of the U.S. election, but with the economic disaster and global havoc caused by the Chinese Communist virus in 2020, it forced other priorities into focus.
Despite the lack of fanfare, Trump’s efforts to oppose communism continue.
The Trump Administration is directly countering the CCP on several fronts
Between 2016 and early 2021, the Trump administration directly countered the CCP on multiple fronts, including supporting the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong, cutting off revenue streams from private companies with ties to the CCP military, and stopping the spying threat posed by Chinese technology companies.
During this Time, the U.S. government began normalizing relations with Taiwan, whose democracy stands in opposition to Beijing‘s repressive communist regime, in defiance of agreements made over the past several decades. The Chinese Communist Party has long dwarfed Taiwan on the international stage.
Last September, then-Under Secretary of State Keith Krach, who is responsible for key U.S. economic growth issues, led a delegation to Taiwan, becoming the highest-ranking State Department official to visit Taiwan since the U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, shifting diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Outsiders interpreted the historic visit as a sign that the U.S. continues to increase its support for Taiwan and defy the Chinese Communist Party. And the significance of the visit was not lost on Beijing.
Crouch said Beijing violated Taiwan’s airspace at least 46 times during the week of his visit, saying, “We were greeted by fighter jets and bombers.”
In the final days of the Trump administration, the State Department lifted all self-imposed restrictions on executive branch agencies’ interactions with Taiwanese officials, setting the stage for a closer relationship with Taiwan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Jan. 9 that the U.S. government had taken these self-imposed restrictions for decades to appease the Communist regime, and that from now on the United States “will not do that anymore.
Orlando Gutierrez Boronat, a Writer and co-founder of the Cuban Bureau of Democracy, said Trump’s policy toward Taiwan is monumental for U.S. democracy.
“I think (U.S.) support for Taiwan is tremendous in all aspects: political, economic, military.” Bronat said.
“The Republic of China (Taiwan) is a longtime ally of the United States, and there’s no reason to treat it differently. They have been at the forefront of the fight for democracy and freedom for decades, and what they have accomplished on Taiwan is incredible. As a human achievement, his support for Taiwan has been outstanding.”
The Communist virus explodes globally
This may not be a coincidence considering the miracle of Taiwan’s staunch opposition to communism and the continued low-level outbreak of the Chinese Communist virus, commonly known as Wuhan pneumonia and the new coronavirus. Before the Taiwanese authorities controlled the entry of foreign travelers, the region’s tourism industry thrived on the large number of mainland tourists, but only seven people have died from the CCP virus in Taiwan since the outbreak.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that there may be a relationship between how close a place is to the CCP and the severity of the outbreak.
Trump’s reaction and rhetoric surrounding the virus has contributed to a significant impact on the world’s Perception of the CCP regime.
On January 31, 2020, less than two weeks after the first confirmed infection was discovered in the United States, Trump banned all Chinese airliners from traveling to and from the United States. Since then, he has repeatedly referred to the virus as the “China virus” and denounced the Communist Party for suppressing warnings of the outbreak and spreading the plague around the world by blocking Wuhan internally while allowing international flights to leave the city.
Combating Communist Theft of U.S. Secrets and Communist Espionage
Within the United States, Trump’s Department of Justice launched an unprecedented crackdown on the theft of trade secrets and related crimes by the Chinese Communist Party.
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions launched the China Initiative in late 2018, which aims to strengthen investigations and prosecutions of cases involving Chinese spies, as well as crack down on Chinese hacking, keep an eye on Chinese overseas talent programs, and counter the national security risks posed by Chinese infiltration and acquisitions by Chinese companies.
Between late 2018 and February 2020, the FBI conducted approximately 1,000 investigations into alleged theft of trade secrets from China. Since 2019, the department has brought more prosecutions related to Chinese Communist infiltration of the U.S. than the Obama administration did during the entire eight-year period, according to a press release to the Department of Justice.
John Brown, deputy director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said, “We believe that no country poses a greater threat than the Chinese Communist Party. From our vantage point, the United States has not faced a similar threat since the Soviet Cold War.”
He said, “Today, investigations related to the Chinese (Communist) government represent a larger percentage of our counterintelligence workload than at any time in the history of the FBI.”
Crackdown on Chinese companies with ties to the Communist Party
The Trump administration is targeting so-called private companies in China that are invariably under the direct influence of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials have long warned that Chinese technology (both software and hardware) could be used by Beijing for espionage, threatening U.S. national security, due to Chinese (CCP) security laws that require companies to cooperate with Chinese intelligence.
To this end, the Trump administration has used two different sanctions blacklists to target Chinese companies and related businesses with ties to the Communist regime, a list of entities, compiled by the Department of Commerce, and a blacklist of Chinese Communist military companies, put together by the Department of Defense. Each type of targeted company has different sanctions. The entity list includes hundreds of Chinese companies, many of which are included because of their ties to the Communist Party’s military.
In a major economic blow to companies with ties to the Communist Party’s military, the Trump administration tightened restrictions on these companies in late December of last year, barring Americans from holding stock in them.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement, “(The ban) will ensure that U.S. capital does not contribute to the development and modernization of the military, intelligence and security services of the People’s Republic of China (CCP).”
Sanctions against human rights violators
The Chinese Communist Party has long been extremely sensitive to the exposure of its abhorrent human rights record in the international arena. The Trump administration has broken decades of U.S. silence on these abuses by sanctioning Chinese Communist Party officials involved in serious human rights abuses.
In July 2020, the United States sanctioned four CCP officials involved in the persecution of members of the Uighur, Kazakh, and other minorities in Xinjiang.
In December 2020, the U.S. Department of State sanctioned 17 current and former foreign government officials under Section 7031(c) of the Department of State Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act, including Huang Yuanxiong, a police officer at the Wucun Police Station of the Xiamen Public Security Bureau who persecuted Falun Gong practitioners in China (Note: Chinese domestic media websites report that Huang was an instructor at the second police unit of the Wucun Police Station of the Siming Branch of the Xiamen Public Security Bureau).
The U.S. sanctions against Huang Yuanxiong are the first punitive action taken against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the more than two decades since the CCP launched its brutal persecution of China’s estimated 100 million Falun Gong practitioners.
Opposing Communism Around the World
The influence of the Chinese Communist Party has spread far beyond official institutions and private companies in China.
By withdrawing from multinational bodies such as the World health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the Trump administration has sent a clear message that the United States will not contribute to or participate in international organizations that sacrifice stated goals to accommodate regimes such as the CCP.
In withdrawing from the UNHRC, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the council “an organization in disrepute” because its membership includes notorious human rights abusers such as China and the communist regime in Cuba.
Trump said he pulled the United States out of the WHO because the Chinese Communist Party pressured the organization to mislead everyone to let down their guard against the Chinese Communist virus amid a blackout of information and misleading propaganda.
Trump has also weakened communist and socialist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua through sanctions and other means. In some cases, Trump’s achievements in other parts of the world have dealt a blow to the communist movement, for example, in supporting Israel, Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in opposition to the stance of the global anti-Israel movement consisting of communism and its allied regimes.
Trevor Loudon, an expert on communist infiltration, told, “The anti-Israel movement that has emerged globally is essentially communist, and when (Trump) takes a stand against Israel, he is taking a stand against communism because Israel’s main enemies are communist regimes such as Iran, or communist-aligned regimes.”
Opposition to Communist Infiltration in the United States
Communism advocates the complete abolition of private property and free enterprise, which may seem difficult to implement in the U.S., but over time, ever-inflating levels of taxation and regulation can achieve this goal as well.
Trump has explicitly opposed the decades-long infiltration of communism into the United States in his policies, successively implementing tax cuts and corporate deregulation to combat incremental government erosion of people’s assets and businesses.
Lower taxes, coupled with executive orders ensuring gradual reductions in regulations, propelled the U.S. economy to its heyday in 2018 and 2019, with record-low unemployment, rising wages and a soaring stock market. As economic conditions improved, millions of Americans dropped out of welfare programs. Previous developments in the U.S. welfare system had brought the country closer and closer to socialism, which itself is the primary stage of communism.
Trump has proven to be a staunch defender of tradition. He has acted to promote religious freedom, restore respect for America’s founding principles, and defend the right to Life of the unborn child. At every step along the way, he has respected the boundaries set by the Constitution and strengthened the documents that have guaranteed American freedom for centuries. Although many of Trump’s executive actions have been challenged in court, he has let the courts decide in each case.
Trump’s presidency has caused a seismic cultural shift by making it once again acceptable to talk about communism in the United States. He threw the issue out in his 2019 State of the Union address, telling Congress in front of an audience of several self-identified Democratic socialists that “America will never be a socialist country.”
He later took those comments to campaign rallies and Twitter, sparking a discussion about socialism as the Democratic Party shifted to the left.
Biden‘s platform was formed by merging with that of Democratic Senator and socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Biden’s first legislative proposal, the CCP viral relief measure, included a $15 minimum wage mandate that Sanders had been pushing for years.
In a speech to global leaders and Americans, Trump denounced communism as a deadly threat. In his message on National Communism Victims Day, he denounced communism as an “oppressive ideology that invariably leaves suffering, destruction and death in its wake.
Trump said, “While Marxism promises equality, peace and happiness, in practice it results in nothing but inequality, violence and despair.”
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