Washington, DC: If Donald Trump was at all apprehensive about returning to the Washington Hilton hotel, where he was allegedly the target of an assassination attempt two months ago, he didn’t show it.
Speaking to the Faith and Freedom Coalition in the same ballroom as that ill-fated White House Correspondents Association dinner, Trump didn’t dwell on the incident, save for a brief opening reference.
“I remember this place,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll have a little more pleasant experience.”
Instead, Trump wanted to talk about the results of last week’s Democratic primaries in New York. And what he said constituted a preview of the next four months in US politics leading up to November’s midterm elections.
Republicans will seize on the leftward shift among Democratic voters in big liberal cities, using it to portray the party as being taken over by “communist” infiltrators who hate America and want to trash its foundations.
“They’re communists, they’re not social democrats,” Trump said of the left-wing candidates in New York who won their primaries with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s backing. “They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”
He said it was easy to be a communist – and that he would make a great one – because all you had to do was promise free stuff. “The problem is after two or three years, the country is a disaster area. The country fails.”
Trump spoke in sweeping, existential terms. Communism was spreading in the Democratic Party “like an uncontrollable form of cancer”, he said. “This isn’t stopping in New York.” Establishment Democrats were neither tough nor smart enough “to fight the plague that’s happening”.
And he linked this supposed threat to the multiple attempts – proven and alleged – on his own life, claiming the assassination of communists’ opponents was “a very important element of their ideology”.
“Assassination is a big deal for them. They’re animals,” Trump said. “This is the greatest threat to our country since its founding.”
The president was far from the only speaker at the Faith and Freedom summit to focus on the results of last week’s primaries in New York.
House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, whose task for the next four months is to defend the Republicans’ majority in that chamber, read out parts of Democratic Socialists of America platform, with each item booed by the conservative crowd.
“The foundations of America are under violent and unprecedented attack,” Johnson told the audience.
“Some of the most radical people who have ever run for office are on the ballot. They are openly running as Marxist communists for Congress … It is now on our own shores, in our own homeland.”
Trump and the Republicans are, in many ways, excited about the campaign ahead. For months, polls have indicated they are heading for a substantial defeat – in the House, at least. The success of certain Democratic Socialists and progressive Democrats allows them to amplify the campaign they were always going to run into a full-blown “reds under the beds” scare.
And they are united on their message. On Friday, prominent Republican strategist and commentator Scott Jennings titled his podcast/vlog: “It’s communists all the way down.”
He drew attention to a video of another Democratic Socialists of America member, Aber Kawas. The daughter of Palestinian refugees, she is running for the New York state senate and won her primary on Tuesday.
In the video, Kawas said it was reprehensible that “we have to apologise for a terror attack that a couple of people did, and then there is no apology or reparations for genocide or slavery”. She was referencing the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and elsewhere.
Jennings said in his vlog the Democratic Party was being overrun by anti-American, anti-capitalist radicals.
“The barbarians are not at the gates, they are already inside. They are here to tear down the American system and rip from you your way of life.”
A recent Marquette Law School poll found that most voters have a negative view of the Democratic Socialists of America: 48 per cent viewed them unfavourably, compared with 21 per cent who were favourable and 31 per cent who said they hadn’t heard enough.
Nonetheless, Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders has been a popular figure for many years, and there are still many Democrats who believe he would have beaten Trump in 2016 if the party had nominated him instead of Hillary Clinton.
But Republicans are clearly settling on their strategy for the midterms. Expect to hear a lot more of all this over the next four months.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
