"Out of Their Minds": Trump Harshly Criticizes Korean American Gubernatorial Candidate... Why?

Francesca Hong Previously Criticized Thanksgiving as "Glorifying American Colonialism"
Trump Launches Fierce Attack, Calling Her a "Communist Force"

U.S. President Donald Trump harshly criticized Francesca Hong, a Korean American Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin (Korean name: Hong Yoonjung, age 37), referring to her as a “communist force.”

On the 2nd, Francesca Hong, the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin, is giving a speech at an election rally held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo by AFP Yonhap News.

During a speech in Las Vegas, Nevada, on August 5 (local time), President Trump called the Democratic Party a communist force and accused the “woman they’ve put forward as a candidate” of insisting that Thanksgiving should be abolished and claiming that the police exist to maintain white supremacy.

He stated, “People like this are dangerous and out of their minds,” and urged support for the Republican Party to block what he called the greatest threat to America: communism.

Although President Trump did not directly mention Hong by name, Hong had previously posted—and later deleted—a message on her social media in 2020, arguing that Thanksgiving whitewashes American colonialism and downplays the suffering of Native Americans, and that the holiday should be abolished. In a recent interview, she also stated, “Thanksgiving is a day that brings the community together, but for some residents it is an extremely painful day.” She had previously advocated for cutting police funding, but changed her stance after entering the gubernatorial race.

Meanwhile, in the Michigan Senate primary, Abdul El-Sayed, a 41-year-old progressive Muslim politician, scored an upset victory over former four-term Representative Haley Stevenson by a margin of one percentage point. U.S. media outlets reported that a wave of young Democratic Socialists has unseated establishment politicians in the Democratic primaries, sending shockwaves through the centrist mainstream of the party.

El-Sayed’s primary victory in Michigan—a key battleground state for both parties—is being interpreted as both a backlash against the centrist, pragmatic Democratic establishment and a demonstration of the progressive bloc’s unity.

The New York Times (NYT) reported, “A deep divide was exposed between the progressive wing, which boosted El-Sayed’s candidacy online, and the majority of core party voters.”

On the same day, President Trump took to Truth Social, his self-created social media platform, to call El-Sayed a “communist and a loser who hates Jews and Israel,” and claimed, “A handful of such out-of-place individuals cannot destroy this golden era or change the course of history.”

The NYT again noted, “A deep divide was exposed between the progressive wing, which boosted El-Sayed’s candidacy online, and the majority of core party voters.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.