Trump intensifies ‘Marxist’ offensive

New York — Lashing out after his arraignment on federal charges last week, Donald Trump took aim at President Joe Biden and Democrats with language that seemed to evoke another era: He was being persecuted, he said, by “Marxists” and “communists.”

Trump has used the labels since he first appeared on the political scene, but it lately has become an omnipresent attack line that also has been deployed by other Republicans. The rhetoric is both inaccurate and potentially dangerous because it attempts to demonize an entire party with a description that has long been associated with America’s enemies.

Experts who study political messaging say associating Democrats with Marxism only furthers the country’s polarization — and is simply wrong: Biden has promoted capitalism and

Democratic lawmakers are not pushing to reshape American democracy into a communist system.

That hasn’t mattered to Trump and other Republicans, who for years have used hyperbolic references to the associated political ideologies to spark fears about Democrats and the dangers they supposedly pose.

Hours after pleading not guilty in federal court, Trump told a crowd of his supporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., that Biden, “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy.”

He again hit on the Marxist theme days later during a telephone rally with Iowa voters. The comments came after numerous campaign emails and social posts in recent months in which Trump has claimed that Biden’s America could soon become a “third world Marxist regime” or a “tyrannical Marxist nation.”

Other Republicans have piled on with similar messaging. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene last week took to Twitter to lambast what she called the “CORRUPT AND WEAPONIZED COMMUNISTS DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED DOJ.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival for the GOP presidential nomination, has argued the U.S. risks falling victim to “woke” ideology, which he has defined in interviews as a form of “cultural Marxism.”

Experts say there is a long history of U.S. politicians calling opponents Marxist or communist without evidence — perhaps most infamously the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led efforts to blacklist accused communists in the 1950s.

In a country that has historically positioned itself against Marxism, “red-baiting is as American as apple pie in political communications,” said Tanner Mirrlees, an associate professor at Ontario Tech University in Canada who has researched political discourse about “cultural Marxism.”

The attacks are carefully constructed to hit voters emotionally, said Steve Israel, a former U.S. congressman from New York who studied political messaging as chairman of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

“Red-baiting is as American as apple pie in political communications.”

TANNER MIRRLEES, ONTARIO TECH UNIVERSITY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR