It is not because of Donald Trump that the Republican Party is associated with the color red (for that you can largely thank George W. Bush and the state of Florida), but few Republicans have embraced the color as enthusiastically as have Trump and his followers. Trump\u2019s branding skills might be overstated, but he has made red baseball caps an unusually potent political signifier.<\/p>\n
To someone of a certain age \u2014 like, say, 78 \u2014 red was at one point associated more firmly with the Soviet Union and communism more broadly. (That it aligned with the GOP only after the fall of the U.S.S.R. is probably not a coincidence.) A \u201cred\u201d was someone believed to hold views antithetical to the United States, someone to be uprooted from 1950s society and government.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s interesting, then, to see Trump lean into the idea that the nation faces a new communist threat \u2014 one that even his supporters aren\u2019t convinced exists.<\/p>\n
On Monday afternoon, hours before the Democratic convention kicked off in Chicago, Trump \u2014 in his inimitable fashion \u2014 presented a sweeping argument against the left.<\/p>\n
After President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, he wrote on his social media platform that he has to beat \u201ca Radical Left Marxist, Comrade Kamala Harris.\u201d He added that \u201cthe good news is that she should be easier \u2026 to beat than Crooked Joe in that the USA will never allow itself to become a Communist Country.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is hardly the first time he\u2019s made such a claim. In 2016, he regularly disparaged Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as a communist. During the 2020 election, he took to describing the left and Biden as advocates of socialism or Marxism or communism, or all of them. There wasn\u2019t much differentiation; each was a term of disparagement understood as such, in particular by Americans who lived through the Cold War.<\/p>\n
Something interesting happened in 2020, in fact. Usually, search interest in \u201ccommunism\u201d follows a regular pattern, dropping in the summer and rising through the fall before peaking in the spring. There\u2019s an obvious explanation for this: Communism generally comes up as a topic of conversation in school.<\/p>\n
The year of the coronavirus pandemic, there was an anomaly: Searches for \u201ccommunism\u201d remained relatively high through the summer. This was certainly in part because restrictions on activity aimed at limiting the spread of the virus were compared to the heavy-handed tactics of communist regimes. It\u2019s probably also related to the virus\u2019s point of origin. Use of the term \u201cChinese Communist Party\u201d to refer to China\u2019s government surged in the wake of the pandemic.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s campaign was deliberate about highlighting the idea that Democrats endorsed communism in part because of whom the campaign was targeting that November. The Republican convention featured a Cuban-born immigrant warning about the risk of America collapsing into a communist system like the one he\u2019d escaped. On Election Day, Trump beat expectations in South Florida, home to many Cuban American expats who were the target of that message.<\/p>\n
By late 2023, though, it was clear that Americans weren\u2019t really worried about the idea that the country was on the brink of collapsing into a communist dictatorship. YouGov asked Americans specifically about the likelihood of such a shift in the next 10 years. A surprisingly large percentage of people said it was likely, but most people described such a change as not very likely or not likely at all.<\/p>\n
The group most likely to say it could happen was Republicans. But only a quarter of Trump\u2019s party indicated that this was somewhat or very likely. And this was nearly three years into Biden\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n
Again, it\u2019s very unlikely that Trump is arguing that Harris, if elected, would establish communes in which people would collectively own systems of production. He\u2019s instead raising the specter of left-wing authoritarianism \u2014 explicitly as a response to the left\u2019s suggestions that he would seek to establish a right-wing authoritarian state. (\u201cTHE DEMOCRATS ARE, \u2018A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY?\u2019\u201d his social media post concluded in his idiosyncratic style.) Trump, of course, has repeatedly embraced other right-wing authoritarians and actively endorsed erosions of liberal democracy, making the rejoinder more than a little specious.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been noted that Trump is largely a product of the 1980s, and that holds true here. In 1984, about the worst thing you could call someone was a communist. In 2024, that\u2019s about the worst thing Trump can gin up, too.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It is not because of Donald Trump that the Republican Party is associated with the color red (for that you can largely thank George W. Bush and the state of Florida), but few Republicans have embraced the color as enthusiastically as have Trump and his followers. Trump\u2019s branding skills might be overstated, but he has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8135,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}