President Trump is a slow learner when it comes to the issue of international communism. One day he is attacking the idea of a communist mayor for New York City and the next day he announces a trade deal with the communist dictatorship of Vietnam. The latter resulted when the U.S. Congress defunded the war effort.

A total of 58,000 Americans sacrificed and died to save South Vietnam from communism. Let’s not forget that on July 4th.

My friend, Vietnam veteran Larry Grathwohl, wrote the 1976 book, Bringing Down America, explaining that the “comrades” of the Weather Underground, a communist terrorist group active in the United States, were North Vietnamese Army troops and their communist terrorist front organization, the Viet Cong, operating in South Vietnam. Indeed, declassified intelligence information demonstrates links between the Weather Underground terrorist movement and the Communist Party USA and the intelligence services of Cuba and the Soviet Union. Larry had come back from the Vietnam War only to find that he had to do battle with communists in the United States. He did so as an FBI informant in the group.

That is our situation today, but Trump doesn’t seem to realize it.

His nemesis, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, is an international Marxist and Islamist to boot. They are united in hatred of America. Yet here is President Trump making Vietnam into a trading partner for the United States, subject to a small tariff on their goods entering the U.S.

He is making the same mistake that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made with Red China.

In this case, a small tariff on communist Vietnam’s exports into the United States will still undermine our domestic producers, especially Louisiana’s shrimp industry.

Frozen warmwater shrimp from Vietnam, Ecuador, India, and Indonesia have been damaging the American shrimp industry for years. Some in the industry have been asking for tariffs of up to 100 percent on shrimp and crawfish imports.

The mistakes made by Trump in his dealings with Vietnam are reminiscent of the mistakes Nixon and Kissinger made with Red China – thinking these communist countries were going to go capitalist if they had access to our markets. Instead, they ripped us off.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has called Vietnam essentially a colony of Communist China and warned, “Vietnam, don't dump shrimp into our markets and put the good people of Louisiana out of work.”

Navarro emerged in Trump’s first and second terms as a spokesman for the established fact that Red China was looting our economy to achieve world domination. Navarro, formerly a professor of economics and public policy at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, understood the national security implications and directed the great film, “Death By China: How America Lost Its Manufacturing Base.”

As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, let’s remember that the American backing of South Vietnam was an honorable and noble mission for freedom. We are also backing South Korea for the same reason. It is why we should continue to back Ukraine – and the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Sadly, the “Greatest Generation” of Americans ended up as cannon fodder for the communist revolution, since the Nazis were defeated but the communists were permitted to regroup in Soviet Russia, take Eastern Europe, and wage wars in such places as Korea, Vietnam, and now Ukraine.

Trump seems to have had a Damascus Road conversion on Russia’s motives in Ukraine, and that is a good thing. He once thought he could make a deal, only to discover that Vladimir Putin still wanted to take over the country. At the recent NATO meeting, he was asked whether it is possible that Putin has territorial ambitions beyond Ukraine, and Trump responded that “it’s possible.”

Yet here he is making a trade deal with Communist Vietnam, which was supported by Red China and Soviet Russia in its war of aggression against South Vietnam. The relationship is still solid. Last year Putin visited Vietnam to sign economic agreements with the dictatorship. He even agreed to build nuclear power plants in Vietnam.

A “Treaty on Principles of Friendly Relations between the Russian Federation and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” was signed on June 16, 1994, in Moscow, indicative of their “strategic partnership.”

Making a favorable trade deal with Vietnam is a disgrace that the Trump administration cannot defend. They only can do so by papering over the fact that Vietnam is a communist dictatorship that treats its workers like slaves for the state.