Assuming they don’t immediately get assassinated,

The ideology of the individual doesn’t matter if there isn’t a mass movement behind them, which seems to be the case in your scenario. They will fail to much of anything worthwhile outside of possibly sabotage to the state, which would make communism very unpopular with most people. This is essentially an adventurist project

If you’re the comrade who finds yourself in this situation, the smart move is not to immediately reveal your power level. You would definitely govern left-wing from an American perspective - do Bernie shit, basically. But the real moves you gotta make need to be done slowly and carefully. Otherwise you will just get

Start by empowering unions and being a massive, vocal advocate for them. Show up to picket lines and be aggressive in your rhetoric. Put out ads and use your stump to say “your president wants you to start a union”. Similarly, vocally support other protests.

Next, you move by carefully winding down programs and manipulating government agencies. End military vehicle sales to police departments. Tell ICE to sit on their asses and do nothing. Point all the three letter agencies at each other and suss out which ones are more capable and willing to work for you against the others. When you’ve got the FBI cracking down on CIA agents, you’re going the right direction.

Meanwhile, go hard on enforcing laws that are on the books but go unused. Punish wage theft, union breaking. Enforce environmental regulations strictly to the point of being onerous. Crush white collar criminals. Prosecute the most openly corrupt politicians in both parties. This shit will make you extremely popular. The vast majority of Americans would absolutely love a strong man president sending politicians, bankers, and CEOs to jail.

All of this is going to accrue power and popularity in your direction. You’ll shift the balance between the capitalist and working class - although the powers that be will obviously remain the powers that be. What you’re doing is making yourself unassailable through popular support, improving what you can, and enabling the working class to build movements dangerous to the status quo that don’t need you.

Then, in your second term, you go absolute sicko mode. In the event that your election is stolen through electoral bullshit, you don’t do a Trump and go belly up. You refuse to concede. You take office and dare the state to stop you. If you’re powerful enough, they’ll be scared to.

All of this is, ultimately, driving towards your own assassination. That’s ok - you are not building communism through the POTUS. You’re making revolution possible. If you get got (which is totally possible), that could be the catalyst to get the revolution popping off.

If you show up day one and try to press the communism button then you’ll just get removed from office and maybe sent to prison.

Best case, anything worth doing would be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court then you’d be impeached or removed with the 25th amendment

I mean, you’d need to keep up that kayfabe for a loooooong time to pull that off.

Best we you could get is a left-Bonapartist, probably a politician with an independent wealth or power base who gets pushed left by the course of events a la FDR.

you would find that the levers of control recoil away from your touch

that’s called bullworth, its an interesting film tho a bit lib

it’d be extremely difficult to convincingly be a horse the ruling class backed, and also having the tools needed to riposte their influence to actually do anything good. i guess what’s needed would be a cult of personality… lmao wait am i saying you’d need to do a reverse fascist? do right-wing populist shit then execute the right wingers after taking power, the paramilitary wing & popular movement protect against the security state & military

but uhhh that’s really just a recipe for dictatorship. building democracy from above is counterintuitive even with good intentions, i think Gaddaffi illuatrates some of the challenges/problems with that approach

Kamala, I hoped you’d reveal your secret account some day. You’ve made so many hard choices to get where you are, but the end’s in sight now. Time to cast off the deception and step into the light.

If they’re alone, then it wouldn’t be much.

Like, they’d have to have spent their entire political career doing two things successfully: 1) playing the game well enough to fool any groups that would instantly mobilize to neutralize any actual leftist politician gaining real power and 2) incubating or head hunting an army of leftists who’d be willing to risk their lives and their families’ lives who would have had to been doing the same thing as this President - being leftists but keeping their power level hidden.

If successful, this army would need to be immediately installed in every available position that the President has the unilateral authority to appoint. A complete purge of all previous personnel no matter how inconsequential the position seems, down to cooks and grounds keepers and unpaid interns.

The political persona would need to be as bombastic as Trump. During the long road to the Presidency they’d have to have been taking extensive notes and collecting blackmail material on EVERYBODY. The flip from establishment to anti-establishment could be justified by showing the receipts. “Hey everybody, to get to the Presidency, here’s all the disgusting shit I witnesses at fundraisers and closed door meetings. Here are some names, here are some pictures, here are some recordings. You all, the American people, can do with that what you will.”

If the court system is still packed with chuds and liberals, then just ignore their verdicts. Like, the supreme court of the USA has no enforcement capacity. Any ruling can be ignored by anybody and if the President isn’t going to send in the federal agencies to enforce a SCrOTUS decision its going to be hard for their decision’s to matter.

Line item vetos and executive orders should have been planned for and prewritten well before taking the presidency. This Pres only has two jobs for the first 6~12 months, bully pulpit speeches inciting the public to pretty much go to war against the capitalists and their fascist enforcers and practically non-stop executive orders. The VP should pretty much be stomping through congress daily with “You will eat the bugs, you will sleep in the pod” energy.

Always remain armed and train as often as possible at close quarter fighting.

You gotta make your bones somehow m8. By the time you’ve secured a presidential nom you’ve done some dark shit to prove your loyalty and the people you just turned coat on own the media. You’d be impeached instantly. Beyond all that you couldn’t just order the legislative branch to make socialism happen. You’d be better off climbing the ranks and sewing dissent in the military until you could launch some kind of fifth column coup.

In minecraft

First order of business: send nukes to cuba and north korea

The only realistic thing they could do is pardon political prisoners like Leonard Peltier. Everything else requires too many moving parts, moving parts that will almost certainly stop moving the instant they get wind that the president is some socialist.

Are you talking about reverse Tricia Cotham?

Fidel, Mao and Deng all fooled the capitalists, as did that middle-eastern guy I can’t remember the name of now.