Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), running for reelection in 2022, minced no words in her fundraising email: She opened by attacking “Joe Biden’s Communist Green New Deal.”           

Then, after slandering Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WYO), Adam B. Schiff (D-CA) and Adam Kinzinger (R-ILL), she warned that Never Trumpers were colluding “with Communist Democrats to rig the 2022 and 2024 elections.”

And she attacked the January 6 House Committee—charged with investigating the treasonous attack on the Capitol Building by Donald Trump’s followers—as the “January 6 Witch Hunt Committee.”

According to Greene, President Biden was “crippling American energy production to impose socialism on America.” 

“I know with your help, we can stop communism and save America,” Greene concluded.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Since the late 1940s, attacking “Communism” and “socialism” has become standard operating procedure for Republicans running for election—and reelection.

Thus, President Donald Trump, addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, on September 24, 2019: “One of the most serious challenges our countries face is the specter of socialism. It’s the wrecker of nations and the destroyer of societies.” 

He cited Venezuela as an example of the failures of socialism, and denounced its president, Nicolás Maduro, as a “Cuban puppet.”

And Trump warned: “Socialism and communism are about one thing only: Power for the ruling class. Today I repeat a message to the world that I have delivered at home: America will never be a socialist country.”

Donald Trump

Yet despite such attacks on socialism and communism, many Republicans—including Trump and Greene—have found cause to empathize with infamous Communist dictators.

Trump stands out predominantly as the first American President known to have colluded with a Russian dictator.

This was an open secret—most explicitly advertised by both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 28, 2019. 

That advertisement came when the two met in Osaka, Japan—their first since the March 22 release of the Mueller Report, which documented Russia’s subversion of the 2016 Presidential election.

An NBC News reporter asked: Would you tell Putin not to meddle in the 2020 Presidential election?

“Yes, of course I will,” replied Trump, grinning. “Don’t meddle in the election, please.”

And he jokingly wagged his finger at Putin: “Don’t meddle in the election.” 

Putin grinned back.

Vladimir Putin

 Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Trump’s affinity for Communist dictators didn’t end with Putin. He boasted that, during an exchange of letters with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, “we fell in love.”

Had a Democrat made such a boast, Republicans would have branded him a Communist traitor.  

And while Trump has slandered literally hundreds of Americans and the leaders of the NATO alliance, he has never once criticized Russian president Vladimir Putin for anything. 

Trump is by no means the only Republican to cuddle up with Communists.

Seven House Republicans—Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Matt Gaetz (FL), Andy Biggs (AZ), Lauren Boebert (CO), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Chip Roy (TX)—voted against stripping Russia of “most favored nation” status after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Nor is admiration of Russia confined to Right-wing politicians. 

Franklin Graham, the son of the late Reverend Billy Graham, praised Putin for a 2013 law that banned “propaganda” promoting “nontraditional” relationships for children.

“Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue—protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda—Russia’s standard is higher than our own?” Graham wrote. “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues.”

Franklin Graham

James Kirchick, an American reporter, foreign correspondent, author, and columnist, has indicted Republicans generally for their fervent embrace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

As he wrote in a July 27, 2017 essay, “How the GOP Became the Party of Putin”: 

“For the past four years, I worked at a think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative, that was bankrolled by Republican donors and regularly criticized the Obama administration….

“What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”

How did this come about?

“Russia’s intelligence operatives are among the world’s best. I believe they made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the ‘evil empire.’ 

“What was left was an intellectually and morally desiccated carcass populated by con artists, opportunists, entertainers and grifters operating massively profitable book publishers, radio empires, websites, and a TV network whose stock-in-trade are not ideas but resentments….

“Surveying this lamentable scene, why wouldn’t Russia try to ‘turn’ the American right, whose ethical rot necessarily precedes its rank unscrupulousness? 

“Why wouldn’t a ‘religious right’ that embraced a boastfully immoral charlatan like Donald Trump not turn a blind eye toward—or, in the case of [evangelical pastor] Franklin Graham, embrace—an oppressive regime like that ruling Russia?”

For millions, the power of love plays a central part in their lives.

Yet, for other millions, hate serves as a force that gives meaning to their lives. And its power must never be underestimated.