"All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country," he told reporters at his New Jersey golf club in August."

""We cannot allow a handful of communist radical-left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws," Trump said Tuesday in Michigan while celebrating his first 100 days in office. The White House did not reply to a request for what Trump means when he calls someone a "communist."

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"On Thursday, senior presidential aide Stephen Miller stepped to the White House podium and uttered the same c-word four times in about 35 minutes during a denunciation of past policies on transgender, diversity and immigration issues.

"These are a few of the areas in which President Trump has fought the cancerous, communist woke culture that was destroying this country," Miller told reporters."

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"The core of communism is the belief that governments can do better than markets in providing goods and services. There are very, very few people in the West who seriously believe that," said Raymond Robertson of the Texas A&M University Bush School of Government & Public Service.

"Unless they are arguing that the government should run U.S. Steel and Tesla, they are simply not communists."