The New Yorker:

On “Comrade Kamala” and the ex-President’s last-century approach to winning in 2024.

By Susan B. Glasser

For the past six weeks, Donald Trump has tried just about everything against Kamala Harris. He and his allies have attacked her laugh, her dance moves, her work ethic, and her border policies. He’s made crude sexual jokes about her, called her crazy, and questioned her racial identity. He says that she is personally responsible for ruining San Francisco and that, if she wins, America itself will cease to exist. None of it has stopped the Vice-President from moving into a lead, slim though discernible, against him.

Enter “Comrade Kamala.” With time running out, Trump finally seems to have decided on a cutting-edge approach to campaigning against Harris—cutting-edge, that is, if he were running against her in the nineteen-fifties. Trump first rolled out the nickname before the Democratic Convention; since then, he has taken to calling Harris a “Marxist-slash-communist,” as he put it during a recent Wisconsin campaign swing, with increasing and, dare I say, near-hysterical frequency. Over the Labor Day weekend, Trump circulated, to his millions of social-media followers, a crude A.I.-generated caricature of Harris dressed in a red hat and sporting a floppy mustache that I guess was supposed to make her look like a Soviet boss. On Wednesday, Trump posted a video of himself on his Truth Social account. In language that suggested he has been sitting around watching reruns of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, he warned, “Comrade Kamala Harris is terrible for our country. She is a communist, has always been a communist, and will always be a communist.” On Thursday, in a speech at the New York Economic Club, he stated categorically—if fantastically—“Kamala Harris is the first major-party nominee in American history who fundamentally rejects freedom and embraces Marxism, communism, and fascism.”

Go to link