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Rick Scott stands against socialism. Maybe he should let Trump know. [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-05
In a pique of performative bullcrap, corrupt Florida Republican Rick Scott has introduced a Senate resolution tackling the greatest existential threat to our Republic: socialism. (I’ll pause for everyone to properly gasp.)
“As far-left politicians like Zohran Mamdani in New York openly embrace socialist ideologies, Senator Scott’s resolution serves as a blunt warning that socialism is not just misguided policy, it is a proven path to tyranny, starvation, and death, as has been proven time and time again, and has no place in America,” his press release says.
As I’ve written, I am skeptical of some of Mamdani’s solutions and his ability to carry them out, but his agenda is literally “make shit cheaper, yo.” It’s great politics, which is why Republicans are losing their minds over it. And socialist Scandinavia, with its happiness and health care and social services and high per-capita GDP, would love a word on the evils of socialism.
Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a rally.
But Scott’s press release is hilariously an indictment of much of what President Donald Trump is doing.
“Socialism is a failed ideology -- it has destroyed countries, crushed economies, and robbed millions of their basic human rights,” Scott claims. “Just look at Cuba and Venezuela, or talk to any of the thousands of families in my state of Florida who fled those regimes after evil dictators stripped them of every opportunity.”
Would be nice to ask some of those Cubans and Venezuelans … but they are being deported back to those countries by Trump, precisely because the administration argues those countries aren’t actually so bad after all.
“Time and time again, socialism has led to the same, inevitable outcomes: misery, poverty, and oppression,” Scott continues.
Again, Scandinavia—and other advanced socialist countries—would beg to differ. But such distinctions are much too nuanced for Scott’s political ambitions.
“It’s despicable to see far-left radicals villainizing capitalism – a system that has helped billions of American [sic] achieve their dreams – and try to tear down our country and rebuild it in their woke, radical image through socialist policies,” he says.
Given deep misery and consternation over the cost of living, I’m not sure Americans are feeling particularly warm and fuzzy about our capitalistic system right now. Heck, even Trump’s strongest MAGA sycophants are economically drowning and can’t pretend otherwise. In fact, they’re begging the government to intervene with more and more assistance. Pandemic-era checks were wildly popular, and let’s not forget, Trump won big on his promise to “lower prices on Day 1.”
Related | Even MAGA minions call bullsh-t on Trump’s social media lies
But here’s the big twist: Scott’s fortress-of-capitalism rhetoric collapses the moment you examine Trump’s economic playbook.
The man who claims to be the savior of capitalism has been busy steering the economy with a heavy hand. He’s demanded companies purge DEI programs; he’s publicly bullied executives from Apple, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and JPMorgan; and he has gone so far as to leverage federal subsidies into an ownership stake in Intel—with promises to expand the model to other firms.
The libertarians at Cato, hardly sympathetic to socialist experiments, call this “a dangerous hybrid between socialism and capitalism,” warning that Trump’s approach is “state capitalism with American characteristics.”
By Rick Scott’s own definition, that’s the government crushing economies and robbing people of their basic rights. Only this time, it isn’t Cuba or Venezuela; it’s the United States under Trump. If Scott were honest, he’d admit that the socialism he rails against is alive and well in MAGA-land—with Trump’s name plastered across it.
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