President Donald Trump might be staking the entire midterm election on a war against "socialists," Republican strategist Marc Short said on CNN — but in terms of his love for flexing government power, he increasingly might as well be one.
Short's observation came during a discussion about the growing influence of the Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party following their recent electoral victories, as well as how Trump might try to tie the rest of the party to them.
"I think that Democrats on the Hill are getting ready for Democratic Socialist candidates next year in the House to wield great power over leadership," said New York Times congressional correspondent Annie Karni, adding that leadership faces clear pressure to make sure these candidates don't cause chaos. Furthermore, she said, "I also think that Marc Short here, who is a Republican, is making the shift that Republicans are making to win this election, which is there's not a great record to run on, so we're going to run on Democrats being socialists."
Short agreed — but offered a massive caveat to all of this.
"To be fair, what I've said ... is I think it'd be a lot easier for us to make that contrast if we weren't the party pushing state-owned enterprises, if we weren't the party putting price controls, if we weren't the party putting credit card caps, the party pushing housing bills."
The bottom line, he said, is that even as Republicans try to paint socialists as a lurking threat, "what you've seen from the second administration in Trump is an economic policy that is harder to differentiate. And now, over the weekend, the most recent thing you see is the vice president advancing expansion of a new entitlement program."