One by one, Republican speakers at President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas this week turned to a far-fetched argument with echoes of the Cold War.
Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana claimed, “Next year the communists will be in Congress — that’s what’s so frightening.” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, said implausibly that there had been a “Bolshevik Revolution in the Democrat Party.”
And when Mr. Trump, the ringleader of this new Red Scare, took the stage, he returned — again and again and again — to baseless claims that Democrats were running as communists in the midterms.
“It’s going to be a communist country if they win,” he predicted, one of at least 60 times a speaker at the convention mentioned communism or communists.
Although this year’s Democratic primary season brought a surge of left-wing momentum, and a handful of victories by democratic socialists running for Congress in Colorado, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida, no credible midterm candidate identifies as a communist. And there is little momentum behind any communist movement in U.S. politics at the federal level.
Still, for months now, Mr. Trump and Republicans, staring down a daunting political environment and the potential loss of one or both houses of Congress, have been trying to cast Democrats as communists, deploying a charge that has little overlap with Democrats’ actual platforms.
Republicans have been grasping for a potent attack line as they confront widespread voter discontent with the president’s war with Iran as well as high gasoline and grocery prices. They believe the left-wing congressional nominees have offered an opening to build an argument that Democrats are outside the mainstream.
“Stalin. Mao. Castro. Democrats,” the Republican National Committee wrote on social media last month. “Different leaders, same goal.”
Whether the attacks make a difference in the midterms is still far from clear. Some Democrats have expressed worry that the rise of democratic socialism in their party could play into Republican efforts to cast them as extremists and that constant mentions of communism could blur the lines for some voters. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s overheated language could weaken the force of the argument.
Mr. Trump and Republicans have pointed to a series of victories by democratic socialists in Democratic primary races — including a suite of June results in deep-blue New York and a stunning Senate upset last month in conservative-leaning Florida — to accuse their opponents of harboring radical beliefs.
Perhaps not since the 1950s or ’60s has an American political party spent so much time talking about communism. In Mr. Trump’s telling, communism poses the gravest danger to the country. It is more severe, he says, than World War I, the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
Communists, he said in a bizarre aside at a July rally in Georgia, even want to destroy an American landmark.
“They tried taking Mount Rushmore down — they want to blow it up,” he claimed, without elaborating.
In some ways, far-left leaders have fed the argument. In 2020, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a leader of the progressive movement and a self-described democratic socialist, praised elements of the Communist Cuban revolution. And Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who unseated a Democratic congressman in a New York primary in June, once maintained a social-media account that circulated a post suggesting that public libraries should carry more Marxist literature.
Two days after Ms. Avila Chevalier and two other self-described democratic socialists swept House primaries in New York, a group of centrist House Democrats signed a letter declaring, “We are capitalist, not socialist.”
Representative Don Davis, a centrist Democrat running for re-election in a battleground district in North Carolina, said in an interview that he had signed the letter because voters across his district had been expressing anxiety about communism.
“I have heard it from the northernmost portions of the district to the central all the way to the southernmost portions of eastern North Carolina,” he said. “Without any doubt, yes, there are genuine concerns.”
By the time the left-wing wave crashed into Florida last month, with the victory of the democratic socialist Angie Nixon in the Democratic primary for Senate, more lawmakers and the veteran Democratic strategist James Carville had agreed to sign the letter, too.
Most Americans have unfavorable views of socialism, according to polls. Communism polls much worse. And even as Mr. Trump mislabels Democrats as communists, some Democrats have jokingly blurred the lines themselves, referring to the area of New York City where one democratic socialist House candidate won as the “Commie Corridor.”
Jon Fleischman, a former executive director of the California Republican Party, said that “your options are limited when the president’s ratings on a lot of key issues, most notably the economy, are underwater.” But he added that describing Democrats as communists was “smart” strategically and would “freak out people.”
Hillary Clinton told Kara Swisher on the “Pivot” podcast that Republican messaging accusing Democrats of being communists would be “very effective” politically. She said Republicans had most likely tested it before making it their central attack.
“People on the left have to be prepared to answer that,” Mrs. Clinton said.
The deployment of over-the-top warnings about communism has become a staple of Mr. Trump’s speeches.
“These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” Mr. Trump said in a dark speech at Mount Rushmore the weekend of July 4, referring to communism more than a dozen times. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”
Republicans have enhanced their standing with Hispanic voters in Florida by linking left-wing American leaders with authoritarian communist governments in Latin America, said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. But Mr. Curbelo was skeptical that the president’s claims of communism would be as potent with other voters.
Representative Don Bacon, a Republican from a swing Nebraska district who is retiring, said democratic socialists were a “good group to run against.” But he questioned the president’s approach of labeling them as communists.
“When you throw out the labels, people don’t know if it’s true or not,” Mr. Bacon said. Mr. Trump might be better off highlighting left-wing Democrats’ policy positions or inflammatory past statements, the congressman added: “I would quote these guys.”
Some Democrats say Republicans are embracing a straw-man argument.
Brad Lander, a self-described democratic socialist from Brooklyn who beat a Democratic congressman in a primary in June, said democratic socialists had “in many cases” been the “fiercest opponents of communists.”
“Democratic socialists want an extension of democracy into more parts of working people’s lives,” he said.
Even as Mr. Trump rages against the far left and seeks to tie it to communist governments, his administration has moved to expand the bounds of executive power — drawing accusations from Democrats that the president has more in common with autocratic communist leaders than they do.
The Trump administration has also been unusually aggressive in acquiring ownership shares of private companies, securing stakes in dozens of companies and reaching a deal that gave the government extraordinary influence over U.S. Steel.
And after Mr. Trump this week floated sending $5,000 to every adult American — but only if Republicans keep their congressional majorities in the midterms — some fiscal hawks in his party criticized what they said was a socialist-style gimmick.
Mr. Trump’s decision to speak so frequently and forcefully about communism is a throwback to the Cold War, said Barbara A. Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia. No president since George H.W. Bush has focused on communism in any meaningful way, she said.
Mr. Trump was a child during the so-called Red Scare, a period of political paranoia in the 1950s. In that era, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, led a series of investigations into supposed communist influence in the U.S. government.
Mr. Trump rose to prominence as a real estate developer in the 1970s and 1980s, when tension between the United States and the communist Soviet Union was high.
The president’s renewed focus on communism is in line with his long-running focus on the 1980s. Roy M. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s mentor and lawyer during that period, had decades earlier been chief counsel to McCarthy’s Senate investigations into communism. Those investigations became infamous for their overreaches.
Mr. Trump’s claims of an internal communism threat, rather than an external one, are particularly reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1950s, Ms. Perry said.
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said Mr. Trump wasn’t qualified to lecture Democrats about communism, pointing to the president’s tendency to embrace President Xi Jinping of China, who leads his country’s Communist Party, and Kim Jong-un, the authoritarian leader of North Korea.
Mr. Trump has celebrated his “good relationship” with Mr. Kim, saying that they “fell in love” during his first term and that the North Korean leader had sent him “beautiful” letters.
Mr. Trump has said he plans to meet again with Mr. Kim by the end of the year.
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
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