For the past six weeks, Donald Trump has tried just about everything against Kamala Harris. He and his allies have attacked her laugh, her dance moves, her work ethic, and her border policies. He’s made crude sexual jokes about her, called her crazy, and questioned her racial identity. He says that she is personally responsible for ruining San Francisco and that, if she wins, America itself will cease to exist. None of it has stopped the Vice-President from moving into a lead, slim though discernible, against him.
Enter “Comrade Kamala.” With time running out, Trump finally seems to have decided on a cutting-edge approach to campaigning against Harris—cutting-edge, that is, if he were running against her in the nineteen-fifties. Trump first rolled out the nickname before the Democratic Convention; since then, he has taken to calling Harris a “Marxist-slash-communist,” as he put it during a recent Wisconsin campaign swing, with increasing and, dare I say, near-hysterical frequency. Over the Labor Day weekend, Trump circulated, to his millions of social-media followers, a crude A.I.-generated caricature of Harris dressed in a red hat and sporting a floppy mustache that I guess was supposed to make her look like a Soviet boss. On Wednesday, Trump posted a video of himself on his Truth Social account. In language that suggested he has been sitting around watching reruns of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, he warned, “Comrade Kamala Harris is terrible for our country. She is a communist, has always been a communist, and will always be a communist.” On Thursday, in a speech at the New York Economic Club, he stated categorically—if fantastically—“Kamala Harris is the first major-party nominee in American history who fundamentally rejects freedom and embraces Marxism, communism, and fascism.”
Trump is nothing if not predictable. He trotted out the Democrats-are-godless-communists canard—calling them a veritable “enemy within”—long before Harris was his opponent. Never mind that attacking Harris as the reincarnation of Joseph Stalin in a designer pants suit is laughably false. (“Pants on fire!” is how one fact-checking Web site rated his Comrade Kamala claims.) On Wednesday, the capitalists over at Goldman Sachs released their analysis of the candidates’ economic plans, which concluded that Harris’s “new spending and expanded middle-class tax credits” would boost national G.D.P., but that Trump’s plan for across-the-board tariffs, corporate tax cuts, and an immigration crackdown could send the country into recession.
But no matter how outdated the Red-baiting playbook is more than three decades after the Soviet Union broke up, Trump has retained his conviction in the potency of the political slurs of his youth. He appears to believe that labelling his opponent a communist is something like a magic formula for winning an American election. “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country,” he advised his followers at a rally in August. I imagine Trump roaming the gilded halls of Mar-a-Lago late at night, summoning the ghost of his late mentor Roy Cohn: Ah, McCarthyism, those were the days.
For the Republican faithful, this is the political equivalent of tuning into a golden-oldies radio station, a point I was reminded of this week while reading a forthcoming new biography of Ronald Reagan by the Washington Post columnist Max Boot. Boot unearthed a letter from Reagan to Richard Nixon during the 1960 campaign trashing John F. Kennedy in terms that would work well as a Trump tweet today: “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age?” Reagan wrote. “Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all.”
Trump’s right-wing superfans are delighted, no doubt, by this line of attack. On Monday, the Trump-supporting billionaire Elon Musk used his social-media platform, X, to circulate another image of Harris in vintage Soviet garb, captioning it “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” I’m sure the idea of Harris as a socialist just waiting to strip away Americans’ economic freedoms resonates deeply with a G.O.P. electorate that has been trained to see every government program as the first step in the long slide to a planned economy. Harris’s recent rollout of a proposal to combat price gouging by supermarkets sent a certain corner of the online right hyperventilating in this direction; the Trump campaign itself has cited a Washington Post piece by the economics columnist Catherine Rampell that says Harris’s plan could be “accurately” labelled a move toward federal price controls. (Which is not quite the Marxist-communist-fascist label the Trump campaign seems to think it is.)
More to the point, the Comrade Kamala slur is in some ways the most generic attack possible against her–a perennial critique that has not stopped any Democratic President of my lifetime from winning. It’s not just fake news but old news, and, as such, is practically a concession, on Trump’s part, that he’s got nothing original to say. At a moment when the Vice-President rallies her audiences with fierce chants of “We’re not going back!” Trump might have thought twice before seizing on a campaign theme straight out of the mid-twentieth century. There’s also the simple matter of electoral math. He’s already got hard-core Republicans and, presumably, former John Birch Society members all locked up, so who, exactly, is he trying to reach with this stuff?
I might also point out the grim irony that it is Trump himself who has expressed admiration for the world’s most prominent Stalin nostalgists—dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. Just this week, the Justice Department announced indictments against two Russian employees of the state-sponsored news network RT, accusing them of secretly paying millions of dollars to pro-Trump online influencers who have been happy to amplify the former President’s claims about Harris’s alleged communism, along with Putin-inspired talking points about the evils of Ukraine and America’s military assistance to it. Trump, no surprise, quickly weighed in about the indictment on Thursday—not to criticize the Russian government for once again seeking to intervene in America’s elections but to attack his own government for daring to call Russia on it. The Democrats, he complained, were simply “resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.” In reality, he claimed, Putin actually wants Harris to win.
Trump remains a remarkably profligate insulter. For all his focus on Harris as a secret Fifth Columnist on behalf of a Soviet empire that no longer exists, he’s also been happy to blast away at her in recent days with other attacks. On Wednesday alone, Trump complained that Harris was a do-nothing complainer, alleged that she wanted to defund the police, and blamed Harris personally for rising energy and housing prices and the collapse of personal savings. He’s even recently accused her of lying about working at McDonald’s as a teen-ager. Is it just me, or does it look like he is starting to panic a little?
Time, for sure, is not on his side. With exactly sixty days to go until the election, the math looks grim, but not impossible, for the ex-President. In this remarkable summer of political change, the one thing that did not move at all were Trump’s numbers. When Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Harris became the de-facto nominee in July, Trump had forty-four-per-cent support in the national polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight. Just more than six weeks later, his average is now at forty-three and nine-tenths—a shift of all of one-tenth of one per cent. While Trump is stuck, Harris is not; her trajectory is up. The point is simple: few people are going to change their minds about Trump at this point, so he either wins by ripping Harris down—or he doesn’t win. Even Roy Cohn might not be able to get Trump out of a jam like that. ♦
