COMMUNIST Party USA co-chair Joe Sims is delighted Donald Trump used an Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore to denounce his party: “Oh my goodness, we’re so back!”

The leader of the so-called Free World’s extended rant against communism as “the greatest threat to our country” surprised onlookers: it has rarely been accorded that status since the end of the cold war.

And while he did namecheck the Communist Party itself, Trump obviously had other domestic opponents in mind, including leftish Democrats who are certainly not communists.

Trump’s tirade cannot be dismissed as a cynical bid to discredit opponents, however.

It reflects ruling-class anxieties about the decline of the West, internationally as the rise of global South countries threatens its global dominance and domestically as working-class living standards decline and the old “liberal democracies” face crises of legitimacy.

And the explicit identification of the radical left as the US’s main enemy aligns with the Trump administration’s record: the reassertion of US supremacy in Latin America, where unlike the Middle East the main obstacle comes from socialist governments and movements; the identification of “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists” alongside “legacy Islamist terrorists” and “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs” as the targets of its counter-terrorism strategy.

Trump revives old slanders: communists are an alien influence brought in by immigrants (“newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life”).

Within US congressional politics he no doubt has in mind left-wing Democrats like Ilhan Omar, whose Somalian origin he often derides. But his assertion that Marxism is treachery (“you can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America”) echoes both McCarthy-era witch-hunts and an older association of communism with immigrants, especially Jews.

It is tied to his rejection of any reckoning with the genocide of Native Americans or the central role of slavery in US history (“those who peddle Marx’s lies… who tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors”).

He links the struggles for social justice and anti-racism with communism and anti-imperialism, as his Secretary of State Marco Rubio did in Munich in February in a speech that — while shocking in its open celebration of colonial conquest and identification of 1945, the year fascism was defeated, as the year European greatness ended — made the entirely accurate point that the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century were inseparable from the world communist movement.

Communism is back, as Joe Sims puts it, both because the engine of the shift to a multipolar world rather than a US-dominated one is Communist Party-led China and because the outstanding example of Latin American independence, the country Trump is so desperate to crush as a warning to others, is Communist Party-led Cuba.

And because support for capitalism is falling across the West: a decline shown sharply in US opinion polls too, and which inspired the Crucial Communism Teaching Act passed by the House of Representatives which would mandate teaching anti-communist history in schools, including the comprehensively debunked figure of 100 million victims which Trump repeated at Mount Rushmore.

There are lessons here for the British left. Alignment with Washington’s foreign policy (including the Trump-mandated rearmament drive) is incompatible with support for democracy and anti-racism.

And we really must do more to justify Trump’s hysteria. Support for the status quo is collapsing, but there is no mass socialist movement waiting in the wings.

Much of the left is liberal, incapable of confronting capitalism or consistent anti-imperialism; many alienated working-class people seek solutions on the far right rather than the left.

Rebuilding a politically educated, Marxist mass movement of and for the working class is essential if we’re to see off Trump and his would-be imitators this side of the Atlantic.