"You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both."
That was President Trump, speaking at Mount Rushmore on the eve of America's 250th birthday, drawing the coming political fight as a simple choice between two sides: communists and patriots.
Choose wisely. pic.twitter.com/nyZsxQUAeK
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 10, 2026
It's a clean line. It may not be the right one.
Trump is right that a growing socialist wing has taken root inside the Democratic Party, effectively challenging its own establishment base, and right to name it as a threat he intends to defeat. Republicans and conservatives across the country have echoed that same framing in the weeks since: the fight ahead is between those who love this country, and those who would remake it in Marx's image.
It's a comforting way to draw the battle lines. It's also a mistake, not because the threat isn't real, but because the label "patriot" is no guarantee of what someone actually believes about how an economy, or a government, ought to work. You can love this country and still have no real attachment to the free market that built it. The two are not mutually exclusive. I have personally met plenty of "patriots" with no love, no allegiance, and no real desire to defend free-market capitalism or economic freedom at all.
A patriot with no loyalty to economic freedom is no different from today's socialists, because their instincts will lead them down the same road eventually. The underlying ideology is the same. Only the rhetoric differs.
To those who say that this may sound like a semantic distinction, the concern behind it is real. The moment you draw the line between communists versus patriots, you leave the door wide open for "patriots" to embrace any economic system short of outright communism and still call themselves the good guys.
Patriotism, as defined this way, requires no real allegiance to the free market at all, and for those who genuinely believe in markets, that ought to be troubling. We live in an era where markets are blamed for nearly everything, including plenty of problems it hasn't caused. Free-market advocates rarely get credit even for what they clearly contributed to. In that environment, conceding ground on principle is just a quiet victory for the very people trying to dismantle the free market altogether.
The real dividing line was never communist versus patriot. It's the market versus the state, and pretending otherwise only lets the second group hide inside the first.
A nation can wave every flag it owns and still choke its own economy to death, regulation by regulation, subsidy by subsidy, until there's nothing left of the market that made the flag worth waving in the first place. If conservatives want a line worth drawing, draw that one. Because the next threat to this country won't announce itself as communism. It will call itself a patriot, as it works to destroy the country.
