DONALD TRUMP’S “red scare” speech on the 250th anniversary of US independence was simply an attempt to “distract from his failing imperialist regime,” the Communist Party said yesterday.

General secretary Alex Gordon condemned Friday night’s speech by the US president as “straight from the playbook of a modern-day tyrant,” adding that “a spectre of communism is haunting Donald Trump.”

Following election wins by candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, Mr Trump’s speech took aim at the progressive politicians pushing back against his wars abroad and violent attacks on immigrants at home.

He said: “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.

“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty.”

Mr Gordon hit back: “A spectre of communism is haunting Donald Trump, just as it haunted popes, tsars, Metternich and Guizot, as Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto.

“Just as in Trump’s first presidential term, as US capitalism collapses and working-class Americans face unemployment, repossessions, inflation hikes and welfare cuts, so Trump’s rhetoric becomes more deranged and his public appearances are accompanied by paramilitary displays aimed at terrorising his own population.

“Trump’s address at the National Mall in Washington DC, the US black-majority capital city, was accompanied by a mobilisation of uniformed white supremacists.

“These are familiar terror tactics of fascist dictators from Mussolini onwards.”

Historian Kenny Coyle rejected Mr Trump’s claim of “100 million victims of communism.”

He told the Star: “This figure is presented so often by corporate media and mainstream academia as an uncontested fact that the claim is rarely subjected to historical research, commonsense questioning or even basic arithmetical skills. It’s not really a surprise that even Trump the Chump could memorise it.”

Mr Coyle, who authored a Communist Party pamphlet Lies, Damned Lies and Anti-Communism on the subject, said the claim hails from a “major pseudo-intellectual effort,” the 850-page Black Book of Communism, published in France in 1997, “so riddled with historical misinterpretations and statistical inaccuracies” that several of its authors later distanced themselves from it.

“Others followed the Black Book’s political agenda but offered wildly differing national calculations.Yet even this didn’t stop the ‘Arithmetic of Atrocity’ camp from astronomically inflating their sums.

“To take just one example, today you can easily find claims on different Wikipedia entries, that anywhere between 10 to 80 million Chinese people were ‘killed’ by Mao in the 1960s. These vast discrepancies of scale should alone invite a certain healthy scepticism about the reliability of the sources. 

“Yet the overall 100 million total remains miraculously intact. Why? Because the figure acts as an ideological trope or political mnemonic, rather than serving as serious historical insight. It also diverts attention from the fact that the US killing machine is still fully operational.”

Communist Party USA co-chair Joe Sims said: “Donald Trump said the Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.

“So says the paedophile, the convicted rapist and fraudster, the twice impeached resident of the White House! Oh my goodness: We are so back!”