When he talks about democracy and freedom its almost always from a western liberal perspective on multiple parties, multiple choices, freedom to organize etc and he doesn’t explicitly support the common one party one leadership theory. Communists have a much stricter definition of reactionary forces that can only be dealt with through “undemocratic” means. This is the crux imo, jumping from “Communism ideal is cool and good” to “here are the steps we need to take and some of them are inherently labelled as anti-democratic”. That is not a line he can cross due to his platform.

He jokes about re-education camps as if its just that, a mere joke and not something that almost certainly would be necessary. Terms loose their meaning, a liberal nordic “prison” is as much a prison as the American slave camps. But you go and tell you want to throw everyone in a prison and oh no heads turn. You explain the Xinjiang prisons are more like a combination of prison and vocation school and liberals wont care about it. You’re attacking the sanctity of “freedom”.

Too much baggage and the fact liberalism dominates the definition of these terms means you can’t realy talk about it in the same way.

All of that on top of his weird American patriotism which as I said I’m not sure how much of it is real makes me realy doubt this in context.