It’s a strategic truism in politics that if you can’t seize the political “center,” where a lot of unaffiliated voters live, you try to push the opposition out of the center by labeling them as extremist. This has been a constant preoccupation of Republicans in the Trump era, thanks to the 45th and 47th president’s inveterate habit of playing to his MAGA base. Hence the effort to brand Democrats — even aggressively centrist Democrats — as “the radical left” is not particularly surprising. Radical is, after all, a relative term on which people can differ, odd as it is to apply it to staid boomers like Joe Biden.

But the GOP is trying something fundamentally different heading into the 2026 midterms: calling Democrats “communists,” “Bolsheviks,” and “Marxists.” Unlike radical, these are terms with a specific content and a very long history. And it’s not just Donald Trump doing this, though he pioneered the practice by calling Kamala Harris a communist (and also a “monster”) back in 2020. He also achieved peak Red Scare hysteria in a high-profile speech this year, as the Guardian reported:

“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said in a speech at Mount Rushmore on 3 July, on the eve of the US’s 250th birthday. He vowed to “vanquish communists quickly” and “send them into exile”.

“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said in a speech at Mount Rushmore on 3 July, on the eve of the US’s 250th birthday. He........

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