House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Sunday the Democratic Party has been overrun by the hard left, pointing to a string of socialist primary victories as proof the threat isn’t theoretical anymore.
“There are many Mamdanis popping up, running for Congress around the country, and you better be very serious about this,” Johnson told Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream. “This is a serious threat to our whole system of government.”
Johnson was talking about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who won his primary last year and sparked a chain reaction. Socialist candidates have since won primaries in New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles.
“Ronald Reagan used to warn about communism,” Johnson said. “It was a distant threat across the world. Now the barbarians are inside the gate. This is not your father’s Democratic Party. That party’s long gone.”
The warning came a day after President Trump’s late-night address on the National Mall during the country’s 250th birthday celebration, where he called communism “like a cancer” that has to be “cut out fast.”
Johnson said rank-and-file Democratic members on the Hill feel they can’t slow down the grassroots energy and money flowing to insurgent left candidates. He called the socialist ideology a direct inversion of what America stands for. “Deviations of Marxism begins with the opposite of the premise of America,” he said.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Democrats to stay focused on taking back Congress in November, saying the real enemy is Trump. Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar of California dismissed the communist framing as fearmongering.
The movement traces its roots to Bernie Sanders’s two presidential runs in 2016 and 2020. Those campaigns lifted candidates across the country, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and Mamdani more recently.
