GOP messaging will follow Trump’s ‘ruthless’ playbook
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is portrayed as wearing clown makeup. Democratic congressional candidates — including an Air Force combat veteran — are labeled “socialist losers” or antiSemites. Others have been singled out as Lyin’ Lucy McBath, Fake Nurse Lauren Underwood, Little Max Rose and China Dan McCready.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, with the blessing of House Republican leaders, has adopted a noholdsbarred strategy to win back the House majority next year, borrowing heavily from President Trump’s playbook in deploying such taunts and namecalling. After losing 40 seats and the House majority in November, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the committee’s new chairman, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader from Bakersfield, decided that their messaging needed to be “ruthless.”
The offensive hinges largely on the relatively facile notion that by tagging all House Democrats as socialists, antiSemites or farleft extremists, they will be able to alienate swingstate voters. On Tuesday night, after the House voted to condemn as racist Trump’s attacks on four congresswomen, the campaign arm’s communications team deluged reporters’ inboxes with message after message calling vulnerable Democratic lawmakers “deranged.”
Their tactics have discomforted some Republicans and highlighted the struggle in the party over how much to lean into the tenor of politics forged by their leader.
“To devolve into childish namecalling usually doesn’t win the argument. I think we can do better,” said Tom Rooney, a former fiveterm Republican representative from Florida.
For the communications arm of the committee, that has translated into circulating photographs depicting Rep. Adam B. Schiff, DBurbank., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as a clown and barraging reporters with statements reminding them of the nicknames with which they refer to Democratic lawmakers and candidates. Some are just referred to as “socialist losers.” Others have been given their own bespoke tags.
Committee officials show no sign of tempering their attacks.
“We make no apologies for aggressively calling out the antiSemitic racists in the socialist Democratic Party totally consumed by their hatred of President Trump and America,” Chris Pack, communications director of the campaign arm, said in a statement.
McCarthy, too, stood firm behind the strategy.
“As a conference, we are united behind his vision to campaign on offense — and expand the map by outworking, outrecruiting and exposing the corrupt, inept new Democrat Socialist Party,” McCarthy said.