Former President Donald Trump is notorious for his name-calling tactics, going all the way back to branding his 2016 primary opponents as "Lyin' Ted," "Lil' Marco," and "Low-Energy Jeb." Now he is facing Vice President Kamala Harris, he is reaching back to the 1950s for the playbook of the Red Scare, and branding her a "communist" — but there are distinct indicators it's not working, wrote Chauncey DeVega for Salon.
"Trump, groping for effective avenues of attack and vulnerability against Kamala Harris, is now calling her a 'Commie', a 'Marxist' and 'Comrade Kamala,' falsely claiming that she wants to impose 'Soviet-style price controls' on the American people," DeVega wrote. These tactics, he wrote, harken back to his old associate, former mob lawyer Roy Cohn, "who was instrumental in the 1950s Red Scare" — as if he "has been reanimated as a type of ghost who is advising the corrupt ex-president from beyond the grave."
But these attacks just aren't landing the way they did in the 1950s, DeVega continued, as Harris continues to gain ground in polling and Trump's efforts to attract new voters appear to stagnate — a situation not helped by the campaign's struggling voter outreach.
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The real problem, wrote DeVega, is that "Harris is not a communist, a socialist, or even a Marxist. She believes in private property, is upwardly mobile and affluent, a member of the elite class, and one of the senior members of a Democratic Party that has embraced 'free market solutions,' Silicon Valley, and Wall Street instead of the needs of average Americans for decades."
So this just isn't credible to the typical voter Trump needs to sway. Moreover, younger voters actually support welfare-state policies, which despite not really being "socialism," are branded as such so often by the GOP that they become linked in voters' minds.
Trump's only real shot in using the "communist" moniker is to try to scare older white voters who were alive during the era of Cold War anxiety, DeVega wrote.
And this, he concluded, ultimately drives home a profound point about the Trump campaign: "Although they present it as some type of restoration or golden age, Donald Trump and his MAGAfied Republicans and the larger neofascist movement represent a return to the worst parts of the American past," while Harris is "offering a competing vision of the future, one that expands and protects democracy and freedom for the American people. On Election Day, the American people will decide which vision they prefer."
