For weeks, Democrats and their media allies have mocked President Donald Trump for warning that the Democratic Socialists of America has a serious communist problem.

They called it McCarthyism. They dismissed it as overheated rhetoric. They treated Trump’s warnings as another example of the president supposedly seeing radicals hiding under every bed.

Trump's language has certainly been blunt — sometimes deliberately so.

But underneath the political theatrics is a very real ideological battle inside the DSA, and the organization's own history and internal factions make that difficult to wave away.

The question is no longer whether communists have an interest in the DSA.

They openly say they do.

The DSA was not originally built as an explicitly communist organization.

Its most influential founding figure was the late Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist who rose to national prominence after publishing The Other America in 1962, a landmark work focused on poverty in the United States.

Harrington's politics were firmly on the left, but there was an important distinction.

He was not a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary seeking to destroy democratic institutions. He was a democratic socialist who believed political change should occur through democratic means.

That distinction mattered enormously to the organization's founders.

They had watched earlier socialist organizations become targets of communist infiltration, particularly through a tactic known as “entryism,” in which revolutionaries enter existing political organizations and gradually attempt to seize their institutions from within.

Harrington and other veterans of the socialist movement understood the danger.

So the DSA's original bylaws contained a provision allowing the organization to expel anyone “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization.”

In plain English, the founders wanted a firewall between democratic socialism and disciplined communist organizations.

That firewall is now gone.

Over the past several years, hard-left activists have gained a majority on the DSA's National Political Committee, the organization's governing body.

That represents a significant ideological transformation.

Members who wanted to preserve Harrington's original vision formed the North Star caucus.

The revolutionary left answered with the Red Star caucus.

And Red Star did something remarkably useful for anyone trying to understand this conflict:

It explained its own agenda.

In a dispatch published several years ago, Red Star lamented that the DSA had once been “an anti-communist, Labor Zionist, social democratic organization.”

Then it called on “all communists in the United States to join us in the democratic struggle within the DSA.”

That is not a Republican talking point.

That is not something Trump invented.

That is a declaration from communists themselves.

And the group went further, acknowledging the DSA's imperfections while arguing that “as communists contest for and win hegemony within the organization, we continue to move toward a revolutionary horizon.”

There it is.

The strategy is not particularly mysterious.

Enter the organization. Contest for control. Win influence. Change the institution from within.

That is precisely the kind of ideological entryism that the DSA's original leadership feared enough to prohibit.

This is where Trump's critics have a legitimate point: the president's rhetoric can be sweeping, aggressive and imprecise.

But rejecting Trump's characterization does not make the underlying development disappear.

The DSA's internal power struggle is real.

Communists have openly organized inside the organization. They have openly discussed winning hegemony. They have openly described a goal of moving toward a revolutionary future.

Americans do not have to accept every Trump slogan to recognize what is happening.

And conservatives should be careful not to flatten every socialist into a communist. Those ideological distinctions matter, particularly when discussing history.

But when an organization that once explicitly barred members under the discipline of democratic-centralist groups removes that safeguard — while a communist faction simultaneously campaigns to win control — pretending nothing has changed is simply dishonest.

The Democratic Party has spent years insisting that Republicans exaggerate the influence of the far left.

Yet the party's own internal coalitions tell a more complicated story.

Candidates openly embracing socialism have won Democratic primaries. Activists have pushed the party toward increasingly radical positions on economics, policing, foreign policy and Israel. Organizations such as the DSA have become important political vehicles for that movement.

The question is not whether every Democrat is a communist.

Of course they aren't.

The question is whether the American political left has developed institutions where openly revolutionary factions can gain influence.

The answer, increasingly, appears to be yes.

And that should concern anyone who values constitutional government, individual liberty and representative democracy — regardless of party.

Trump may have sounded the alarm with a bullhorn.

His opponents may prefer to laugh at the noise.

But the documents, factions and internal battles inside the DSA suggest there is something underneath the alarm worth examining.

The radical left does not need to announce a coup at the gates.

Sometimes it simply takes control of the organization from the inside.

And apparently, the DSA's own communists are perfectly willing to tell us how they're doing it.