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President Trump is many things. A communist is not one of them.
On September 16, Congressman Jim Himes made the opposite claim official. His office issued a press release headlined “No Administration…More Communist than the Trump Administration”.
The press release recaps Himes grilling Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the September 15th House Financial Services Committee hearing and repeating the line for the record:
“I can think of no administration in the last 50 years that is quite as communist as the Trump administration.”
Himes did not mutter it in a hallway. He said this to the Treasury secretary, then published it under his own name. The target was Trump: tariffs, government equity stakes in private firms, bond-market operations, even the President’s talk of $5,000 for voters. In Himes’s telling, that package is communism.
This economic activity and investment is not. The reply belongs in the same public record. Readers can find Goldstein’s running commentary, including the campaign press releases and the longer record on Himes, at The Goldstein Substack.
The word Himes chose is not a throwaway. He is a resident expert on the subject of Communism. He did not learn it from a textbook. He learned it in Nicaragua, among the Sandinistas he chose to study and plainly admired the Communist regime that rules Nicaragua.
He Loved the Field Laboratory
As a Harvard undergraduate, Himes wrote his senior thesis on “The Sandinista Defense Committees and the Transformation of Political Culture in Nicaragua.” In the summer of 1987 he spent two months in Nicaragua living among the committees and interviewing Sandinista organizers. That was not a required survey course. It was a chosen apprenticeship in how a Marxist-Leninist movement remakes a country.
I wrote about that thesis two years ago, in February 2024, because Himes’s own words—not mine—show how closely he studied the machinery of revolutionary political culture. That essay is here: How Himes Wanted To Transform A Country Into A Marxist Leninist Autocratic State — In His Own Words, Not Mine.
Himes quoted Lenin on an elite party as “the agent of transformation.” He quoted Castro that “revolution and education are the same thing.” He described the Sandinista program as calling for “the complete overhaul of Nicaraguan socio-economic and political structure.” He treated neighborhood defense committees as the instrument for changing what people believed, not merely what the state owned. That is the work of someone who found the communism model compelling.
I said so two years ago because Himes’ paper does not read like a cold brief. It reads like a student who went looking for a revolution and liked what he found. A thesis is not a membership card. It is also not a shrug. Himes picked the Sandinistas. He lived with their organizers. He wrote them up as a case study in how to transform political culture. That is expertise. It is also affinity and qualifies him as a subject matter expert on communism.
If anyone sitting on Financial Services should know that “communist” is not a synonym for “tariff,” “equity stake,” or “Treasury buyback,” it is the congressman who made himself a student of Sandinista power. He knows the difference between a customs duty and a vanguard party. He used the heavier word anyway.
The Charge Does Not Fit the Tool
Tariffs are not a communist invention. They are among the oldest economic tools of the United States government.
The Congressional Research Service reports that tariffs and other customs charges were the largest source of federal revenue in the 18th and 19th centuries and generated the bulk of federal revenue until the Civil War. Alexander Hamilton’s system under President Washington relied on customs duties, along with excise taxes, to finance the new government and service the debt.
It would go too far to say tariffs were the federal government’s only revenue source. Excise taxes existed too. The larger point is unmistakable: America relied heavily on tariffs long before it relied on a permanent federal income tax.
The first temporary federal income tax arrived in the Civil War. The Sixteenth Amendment was not ratified until 1913. Washington’s America had tariffs. It did not have the modern federal income-tax system.
Why Tariffs are Needed Today? - Domestic Production and National Security
The Trump administration has said, in its February 2026 tariff policy, that import duties are meant to “incentivize the return of domestic production.” Later actions on steel, aluminum, copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, drones and polysilicon have been tied to manufacturing, supply-chain security and strategic industries.
Those policies can be good, bad, too costly, or poorly designed. The U.S. International Trade Commission found that the first Trump administration’s Section 232 steel tariffs cut affected imports by about 24 percent and raised domestic steel production about 1.9 percent; aluminum imports fell about 31 percent while domestic production rose about 3.6 percent. The same report found higher prices, costs borne largely by importers, and reduced output among some downstream manufacturers.
That is an argument about industrial policy. It is not an argument about communism. Himes is free to say the costs outweigh the benefits. He is not entitled to collapse that disagreement into a word he studied in Nicaragua.
If Equity Stakes Are Communism, Start With Goldman Sachs
Himes spent 12 years at Goldman Sachs and became a vice president there. His campaign biography confirms it.
On October 28, 2008, the United States Treasury purchased $10 billion in Goldman Sachs preferred stock and received a warrant for more than 12 million shares of Goldman common stock. That is in Goldman’s own SEC filing. Himes did not arrange the deal. It happened before he entered Congress.
If government ownership of a slice of a private firm is “communist,” then the crisis-era rescue of Himes’s former employer belongs in the same conversation. The more honest description is that American administrations of both parties have intervened in markets in emergencies. An equity stake does not turn the United States into Nicaragua any more than a tariff does.
Precision Is the Point
Himes is a resident expert on communism long before the new school of democrat socialists that he has cozied up to. Himes wrote about Leninist vanguard parties, Cuban educational doctrine, and Sandinista committees built to remake a people from the block up. That is why the hearing line was not tough. It was cheap. A man who loved the communism field laboratory (while many from Nicaragua escaped to America) should not cheapen the word when the subject is steel duties and bond buybacks.
You can debate the tariffs, the buybacks and whether industrial policy is worth the price. Those are the questions that the Financial Services Committee exists to examine.
Do not call two centuries of American customs policy that helped shape the nation and fund a nation prior to a federal tax system “communist” when you once sat in Nicaragua studying the real apparatus, wrote it up with sympathy, and then asked voters to treat you as a serious man on finance and intelligence.
Himes raised the accusation from his committee seat. His own thesis gives the public a better dictionary than the one he used on Tuesday.
If Himes is so opposed to Communism why did he vote against the bill condemning socialism and the Democrat Socialists of America (DSA), a political movement that wants to destroy our system of government and have the state take over the means of production. That is communism. His rhetoric falsely accuses the Trump Administration of Communism and his vote in Congress confirms his support of Communism.
Himes is the true Communist and I believe he will support the DSA if they take control of the US Congress.
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