Trump casts Democrats as red 'menace' with McCarthyist rhetoric ahead of US midterms The US midterm election campaign is gaining momentum, and US President Donald Trump is reviving Cold War era rhetoric to peg the Democratic Party as extremists and a red "menace". US President Donald Trump is reviving Cold War-style warnings about communism, casting the Democratic Party as a red "menace" as Republicans hunt for a midterm message to hold their narrow grip on Congress. The rhetoric, echoing the anti-communist crusades of the 1950s, has surged from Trump's speeches into the broader Republican campaign machine after a string of democratic socialist primary victories in New York and Colorado.

And it has grown apocalyptic, often overtaking the president's fixation on election fraud, as he frames November's vote as a civilizational clash between Republican "common sense" and left-wing extremism. During weekend speeches at Mount Rushmore and in Washington marking America's 250th anniversary, Trump warned of a communist "menace" that needed to be cut out "like a cancer". To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement.

One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. At a recent religious conference he went further, accusing the Democratic left of being "hardcore, godless communists" who wanted to "completely destroy the traditional American way of life".

The rhetoric reflects a sharpening midterm strategy for Republicans facing frustration over inflation, affordability and the fallout from Trump's war with Iran. But it conflates democratic socialism – which operates within elections and a market economy – with communism, associated with central planning, one-party rule and abolishing private ownership of major industries. Analysts say the party is trying to turn the elections from a referendum on Trump into a choice between two ideologies, using the rise of the far-left to paint all Democrats as radical.

"Trump's (Republican Party) is perceived by many voters – particularly independents – as too extreme in their policies," Daniel Drezner, a politics professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts, told AFP. "One way to address that before the midterms is to paint the opposition party as even more extreme." The Washington Post reported that Trump's allies have sharply increased their online use of "communist" and "communism", with average weekly mentions up 43 percent from a year ago. Senior Republicans have echoed the message.

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned Sunday that "barbarians are inside the gate" while Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called the election a choice "between communism and common sense". The push follows a handful of far-left primary wins that have unsettled Democrats and given Republicans a potent attack line in the fight for Congress. McCarthyist speech Rick Stengel, an official in the administration of Barack Obama, joked that Trump's Independence Day remarks sounded as if the White House had just "discovered a July Fourth Joseph McCarthy speech from 1952".