President Donald Trump has revived one of the oldest attacks in the Republican playbook, branding Democrats as communists, and one columnist argued Tuesday the Cold War-era tactic may backfire.
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“It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump went full Joe McCarthy,” Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton wrote.
In his July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore, Trump warned that communism had resurged as a menace in the country and told the crowd, “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot,” insisting the two cannot coexist. He named no one, but the rhetoric followed a run of primary wins by democratic socialists, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and insurgents in Colorado.
Trump has leaned on the label for weeks, ranting against so-called communists after Mamdani-backed candidates swept New York primaries and calling the movement the biggest threat to the country since its founding. One historian dismissed the Rushmore address as “Joe McCarthy red scare idiocy.”
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Parton traced the tactic to Trump’s late mentor Roy Cohn, who sat beside McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings and later handed Trump the same attack-and-deny playbook. She argued the charge has lost its sting, writing that the candidates’ agenda is ordinary progressivism, not communism, and that the accusation sounds as dated as the era it came from.
The real fault line among voters, the columnist wrote, is U.S. policy toward Israel. She noted Trump is deeply unpopular with Democrats and independents alike and that his Iran war has unsettled his own coalition.
“I suspect that Trump may have overplayed his hand,” she wrote, concluding: “Yelling ‘commie’ isn’t going to help that. In fact, it’s very likely to make it worse.”
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