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, 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.

It’s also true that American political discourse lacks a widely accepted term

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