Trump Calls Harris a ‘Communist.’ That Shows How Worried He Is.
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. For example, 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, redbaiting, 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.
It’s also true that American political discourse lacks a widely accepted term for people who don’t believe that the government should control the means of production but who do believe that we should have policies to limit economic inequality and prevent avoidable hardship. To find such a term you need to go to European countries in which it was important to distinguish between parties supporting a strong social safety net and Communist parties, which weren’t at all the same thing. In these countries, politicians like Harris, who supports a free-market economy with a robust social safety net, are known as social democrats.
The thing is, social democracy isn’t a radical position. On the contrary, it has been the norm for generations in all wealthy nations, our own included.
True, America’s social safety net is less comprehensive than those in Western Europe. Even so, we have a universal retirement system, Social Security, and universal health care for seniors, Medicare. Medicaid, which provides health care to lower-income Americans, covers around 75 million people. About seven million are covered by CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes health care for millions more. And so on.
Furthermore, these programs have overwhelming public support. At least three-quarters of registered voters have a favorable view of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The A.C.A. was unpopular when enacted but now has 60 percent approval.
If you believe that the government shouldn’t be supporting seniors and paying for many Americans’ health care, that’s a philosophically defensible position. And there are certainly activists on the political right who consider just about the whole expansion of government’s role since the New Deal illegitimate. But they have very little support outside their ideological bubble.
Even Friedrich Hayek, whom libertarians have adopted as their intellectual patron saint, conceded that there is no reason “why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”
Which brings us back to Harris. She’s a social democrat who favors government programs that mitigate the harshness of a market economy — but so are almost all Democrats, most Americans and, whether they realize it or not, many Republicans. She wants to expand the social safety net, especially for families with children, but the suite of policies she supports wouldn’t represent a fundamental change in the role of government. She has in the past called for single-payer health care, but has since backed off that position; and if you think a single-payer system is a radical, un-American idea, what do you think Medicare is?
So where does this Kamala-the-communist stuff come from? It could be that Republicans believe they can convince voters that a moderately center-left Democrat who is a former prosecutor is a communist because she’s a Black woman — a twist, perhaps, on the “welfare queen” trope of another era.
But it may be less calculating than that. To all appearances, the Trump campaign has been caught flat-footed, first by President Biden’s withdrawal from the race, then by the surge of Democratic enthusiasm and Harris’s unexpected effectiveness as a campaigner.
Even negative public perceptions of the economy, which have been Trump’s ace in the hole, seem to be evaporating as a political force. A New York Times/Siena College battlegrounds poll released in May gave Trump a 20-point advantage over Biden on the economy; that advantage was down to six points over Harris in the latest Times/Siena poll of three battleground states. A new poll by The Financial Times shows Harris slightly ahead on the issue nationally.
Trump and MAGA seem to be responding by throwing lots of stuff at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.
However, the kind of character attacks that worked against Hillary Clinton and, in a different way, against Biden don’t seem to be gaining traction. I almost felt sorry for the Fox News host Jesse Watters, who tried to attack Harris by saying: “She likes wine. She likes food. She likes to dance.” This is supposed to make voters dislike her?
So since nothing else seems to be working, hey, why not call her a communist?
Opinion Columnist
Inflation: Put a Pork in It
The data keep telling us that inflation is basically over as a problem.
This morning we got the latest report on producer prices, and it was “soft.” That’s a good indicator for the much more widely watched Consumer Price Index, which we’ll get tomorrow. More important, the details in the report were especially encouraging for yet another price index, personal consumption expenditures, which won’t be released until later this month but which the Federal Reserve prefers as a basis for monetary policy.
This report follows some good news about inflation expectations.
Economists generally believe that the stagflation of the 1970s was so hard to end, requiring years of high unemployment, because expectations of continuing high inflation had become entrenched among businesses and consumers. Two years ago, when inflation was near its recent peak, I argued that disinflation would be much easier this time because it wasn’t similarly entrenched.
I was right. In fact, yesterday the widely followed New York Fed survey of consumer expectations found that expected inflation over the next three years has fallen to its lowest level since the survey began in 2013:
One-year inflation expectations: 3.0%
Five-year inflation expectations: 2.8%
Three-year inflation expectations: 2.3% (new series low)
Still, some people are having a hard time letting go of the narrative that America is suffering from runaway inflation. Among those people, of course, is Donald Trump, who ranted about consumer prices in last night’s conversation with Elon Musk.
I continue to be especially struck by Trump’s odd obsession with the price of bacon, which he insists costs “four or five times more than it did a few years ago.” This simply isn’t true.
Beginning of Trump’s term:
> Price of 1 pound of bacon: $5.42
> Inflation-adjusted price of 1 pound of bacon: $6.66
> Price of a dozen eggs: $1.68
> Inflation-adjusted price of a dozen eggs: $2.82
End of Trump’s term:
> Price of 1 pound of bacon: $6.64
> Inflation-adjusted price of 1 pound of bacon: $7.33
> Price of a dozen eggs: $1.67
> Inflation-adjusted price of a dozen eggs: $3.10
Honestly, I find Trump’s delusions about smoked pork harder to understand than his conspiracy theories about crowd sizes. After all, grocery prices are part of everyday experience, and easy to check. Why haven’t some big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to him to say, “Sir, you’re wrong about bacon”?
