Donald Trump has been using an ugly word to describe Vice President Kamala Harris. No, I don’t mean privately calling her the B-word, although he reportedly does. I mean “communist,” an insult echoed by some of his allies. Elon Musk, in a post on X, declared “Kamala is quite literally a communist”, demonstrating, among other things, that he quite literally doesn’t know the meaning of “literally”.

Now, Harris obviously isn’t a communist. So why does Trump say that she is? Well, red-baiting, like race-baiting – which Trump also does when it comes to Harris – is very much part of the American political tradition. For example, early in his political career, Ronald Reagan was a part of Operation Coffee Cup, an effort to convince voters that government health insurance, in the form of Medicare, would destroy American freedom.