The photos plastered in the hallways were all of President Trump. Jackets were bedazzled with his name. And the red hats dotting the audience on the floor of the convention hall were embroidered with MAGA, his indelible political slogan.
And yet, at a gathering that fans and foes alike had nicknamed the “Trump-a-palooza,” the president and his Republican allies spent more time whipping up fears about the specter of socialism, communism and even anarchy than they did trumpeting the successes of his administration.
As they took the stage at the party’s unusual midterm gathering in Dallas on Wednesday night, amid growing Republican anxiety about the midterm elections, speaker after speaker focused on what they characterized as an urgent threat to American life: a Democratic Party they claimed had veered beyond its traditional liberal principals into a dangerous, un-American ideology.
Democrats running for Congress were “evil.” They were “communists and anarchists.” And they wanted to turn the country into “a socialist hellscape.”
“I call it the Bolshevik Revolution in the Democratic Party,” said Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority leader. “Let’s make sure that when we wake up the morning after Election Day we know we did everything we could to defeat socialism.”
President Trump has long been a master of the politics of fear, regularly stoking anxiety about immigration and crime.
Now, as his party faces its most difficult political environment in years, the president and his supporters are attempting — once more — to channel fear into electoral victory. It’s a strategy that is both old and new, playing off the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America to stoke Cold War-era fears of communism and socialism.
“The radical left is relentless in their pursuit to remake America in the image of every socialist hellscape of the last century — to import the misery of failed workers’ paradises like the Soviet bloc, Caracas and Havana,” Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told the crowd.
By the time Mr. Trump took the stage, at the end of the evening, the narrative of Democratic extremism had been woven into nearly every aspect of the six-hour program.
Mr. Trump took nearly 75 minutes to weave his way into a description of Democratic candidates as Marxists and terrorist sympathizers.
He moved through the country’s biggest battleground races state by state, attacking each Democratic nominee by name. Should they win, he warned, Congress would be controlled by a “communist caucus.”
“When you vote in this election, you can tell these far left lunatics and fanatics that America is not for sale,” said Mr. Trump. “We do not negotiate with communists, with socialists, or with radical left lunatics.”
Democrats brushed off the characterization as an effort by Mr. Trump to distract from the issues at the top of mind for voters, including the high cost of gas, groceries and health care.
“The biggest liability in American politics right now is Donald Trump,” said Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in a statement. “The president is a lame duck failure who is dragging his party toward defeat.”
Despite the bravado among Republicans in Dallas, the decision to focus so much attention on vilifying Democrats amounted to a tacit admission that the best shot Republicans may have of victory — or at least staving off a wave of defeat — is to paint the alternative as worse.
Of course, Mr. Trump didn’t invent fear as a political tactic. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson stoked worries of nuclear annihilation in a famous 1964 campaign ad. In 1988, worries about crime, with racial overtones, were pushed by President George H.W. Bush. And the past three Democratic presidential nominees have rallied their voters by casting Mr. Trump as a dire threat to democracy that could lead the country into fascism.
After a decade of such attacks, Republicans are trying to flip the script and paint Democrats as the ones who would to destroy the country’s democratic foundations.
“This is a battle for the heart of our nation,” shouted Senator Tim Scott, the head of the party’s Senate campaign arm, from the stage. “The Democrats’ extreme candidates will rip that heart out of our chest. They hate our culture. They hate what it means to be American.”
Historically, the president’s party loses seats in the midterm elections. But for Mr. Trump, the political landscape looks bleaker than most.
Surveys indicate that, with the exception of Richard Nixon, Mr. Trump is the most unpopular second-term president at this stage in his tenure in the history of polling going back to the 1940s. On issues where he once was strong — like the economy, national security and immigration — Mr. Trump is now underwater. The wound has been largely self-inflicted, with his support weakened by the unpopularity of several of his signature policies, including tariffs, the war in Iran, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and various legacy renovation projects in Washington.
In his speech, Mr. Trump boasted about his tariff policy, celebrated his work on the White House ballroom and vowed that the United States would soon win the war with Iran. But the Republican candidates who spoke about the accomplishments of the Trump administration made little mention of those issues.
Far more time was spent attacking Democrats — past, present and future. An image of Hasan Piker, the leftist online streamer host, flexing his six-pack abs in blue underwear, flashed on the jumbotron. Bright white letters declared, “America will never be a communist country” over grainy footage of Mr. Trump.
An ominous, black-and-white backdrop that appeared behind speakers showed angry images of prominent Democrats, including former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., former Vice President Kamala Harris, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, two former presidential candidates.
Many of the speakers argued that the country was near collapse under the Biden administration, overrun by crime and illegal immigration and crippled by high prices.
“Our country was an embarrassment,” said Mr. Trump. “We had a president that couldn’t walk off the stage.”
The focus on the last administration was an attempt to capitalize on Democrats’ enduring challenges with their own image. The party still hasn’t fully rebuilt support from its defeat in 2024, which sunk Americans’ views of Democrats to their lowest level in decades. Even as their candidates lead polling across key battleground states, the party’s national approval rating remains underwater.
Some Democrats have looked to a progressive wing, embodied by figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, their nominee for Senate in Michigan, as the future of their party. Others have insisted that such candidates have limited appeal outside of deep blue enclaves.
As Democrats battle over their future, Republicans are rushing to brand them all as outside of the mainstream of American political life. In his speech, Mr. Trump offered his analysis of the state of the Democratic Party, proclaiming recent primary winners to be the “most extreme and dangerous group of candidates” to ever seek office.
“These people are radical left communists,” he said. “In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics.”
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