In the space of a single week, the contours of the Trump administration’s political strategy heading into the November midterms snapped into focus, and it is a strategy rooted in fear. Fear of a left that is winning elections. Fear of a working class that is organizing. And fear of what happens when ordinary people discover that the political system can actually deliver for them.
On Tuesday, June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth, Texas, handed down what can only be called political sentences. Eight defendants connected to a July 4, 2025, noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado received a combined 450 years in prison.
The most chilling case was that of Daniel Sanchez Estrada—a man who was not even present at the protest—sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist zines. His wife, Maricela Rueda, received 70 years for apparently asking him to move them. Others got 50 years. And Benjamin Song, convicted of attempted murder for firing a shot that wounded a police officer, received 100 years.
The Justice Department crowed that these were “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.”
Neither the involvement of any organized terrorist group nor the existence of a coordinated murder plot was ever proven in the courtroom. What was proven, to the government’s apparent satisfaction, was that these activists wore dark clothing, used Signal, attended anarchist book club meetings, and possessed political pamphlets.
Then, on Friday, June 26, Trump stepped to the podium at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference in Washington to deliver his red-baiting sermon that served to reinforce the politics behind the Texas trials.
Coming right after a string of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) victories in New York primaries—where candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept several congressional and state legislative races—the president went full McCarthy.
He called DSA candidates “hardcore, godless communists,” warned of a “cancer” that is “permeating our country called communism,” and declared communism “the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” He called DSA members “animals” willing to assassinate opponents. He warned America would become “a Third World country in every way” and that people would “suffer or die” if Democrats won.
He accused his Democratic opponents of capitulating to the left within their own party. “They’re not smart enough or tough enough to fight the plague that is happening right before your very eyes.” The Democrats, he claimed, “are becoming a Communist party–not social Democrats. They are communists.”
Though the reference to “social democrats” and the distinction between them and Communists suggest more serious political analysis on the president’s part, the distinction was likely lost on his audience. Regardless, though they were meant to project strength, Trump’s remarks were a sign of electoral desperation.
Unmistakable pattern
The editorial board of Peoples World warned last September that NSPM-7—Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum—was reviving the worst excesses of McCarthyism. NSPM-7 ordered Joint Terrorism Task Forces to target Americans for supposed commitments to “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “anti-Americanism.” It was a list so sweeping it could ensnare virtually any critic of U.S. policy.
The Prairieland sentences are the inevitable product of that framework. As Sufia Khalid, defense attorney and deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center, put it to Democracy Now: “Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence, not engaged in any violence, not interested in any violence.”
Judge Reed O’Connor, who decided the sentences for the defendants, made the political intent explicit, reportedly telling the courtroom he was ordering the maximum in each case because “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”
These sentences—longer than any handed down to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who participated in the attempted Trump coup of 2021, many of whom the president subsequently pardoned—reveal everything about what kind of dissent this administration is prepared to tolerate.
Right-wing political violence: pardoned. Left-wing political literature: 30 years behind bars.
Red-baiting as a midterm strategy
The timing of Trump’s Faith and Freedom speech is no accident. With his approval rating hitting all-time lows amid persistent cost-of-living concerns, Trump is reaching for the oldest weapon in the reactionary arsenal: the Red Scare.
The DSA victories in New York—in Trump’s own hometown—have rattled the White House, and the president has decided that smearing Democratic Socialists as communist assassins is the path to re-energizing his base.
The Communist Party USA wasted no time calling it out. “MAGA is going to lose the midterms, and Trump’s getting desperate,” CPUSA Co-chair Rossana Cambron said in a statement released to the media.
Fellow CPUSA Co-Chair Joe Sims drew a sharp line against Trump’s characterization of DSA: “Democratic socialists are just that: democratic and socialist. They want reforms to relieve suffering. Stop the red-baiting.”
As for their party, Sims said “Communists want to change the capitalist system fundamentally—before climate change, nuclear war, AI, or a pandemic kills us all.” He added that the CPUSA is “for democracy and socialism—a Bill of Rights Socialism that puts people and planet before profits.”
The party argued in its statement that Trump’s red‑baiting is a smokescreen for attacking working‑class organizing, unions, and general democratic dissent. “This is old news,” Cambron said, “but the American people aren’t going to buy it.”
On the economic reality Trump has been busily distorting, the CPUSA was equally direct: “It is capitalism and the drive for maximum profits that is the greatest threat to this country—the housing crisis, price-gouging, and war-mongering are driving our crisis.”
That message will likely resonate with the voters who turned out for Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez in New York—candidates who ran on affordability and housing relief from a cost-of-living crisis the Trump administration has done nothing to address and much to worsen.
The bell tolls again
As People’s World wrote last fall, when McCarthyite persecution of the left was at its height in the middle of the 20th century, the CPUSA issued an open letter to the nation: “The bell tolls not just for the Communists alone, but for the hard-won rights of all Americans.” That bell is ringing again, louder now with each passing week.
The Prairieland defendants—trans people, tattoo artists, vegans, anti-ICE community organizers, book club members—will spend the better part of their lives in federal prison unless their appeals have some success. Their sentences, however, serve a bigger purpose. They are meant as a warning to every union organizer, every tenant association, every immigrant rights group in America.
But these warnings are aimed at groups of people who are already organized, already motivated, and already winning elections. Trump’s tirade at the Faith and Freedom Coalition, delivered days after the Prairieland sentences landed, is not the sign of an administration in control of events. It is the sign of one scrambling to contain them.
The White House is stepping up its attacks because the left is stepping up its work. That is what desperation looks like, dressed up in the language of patriotism.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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