Trump revived communist attack on Harris over grocery price plan

Donald Trump kept calling Kamala Harris “Comrade Kamala” and used a fake communist-themed image to sell the label as he attacked her grocery price plan. He tied Harris’s proposal for a federal ban on food price gouging to “communist” and “Soviet-style” price controls, turning kitchen-table inflation into an ideological fight.

Trump defended the tactic by saying he had to run the campaign his own way and that it was “hitting a nerve.” The strategy fit a long-running pattern of red-baiting in American politics, in which opponents are cast as extremists to harden partisan lines and shift attention away from immediate economic pain.

The substance of Harris’s proposal was narrower than Trump’s attack suggested. NBC News noted that more than three dozen states already had price-gouging laws or similar rules, and fact-checkers said Harris’s plans did not amount to communism or Marxism. Harris’s campaign said the point was grocery affordability, not state control of the economy.

That distinction mattered because voters were already fixated on prices. Pew Research Center found on Sept. 9, 2024, that 81% of registered voters said the economy would be very important to their vote. AP-NORC found about 8 in 10 registered voters said the economy was one of their top issues, and AP VoteCast later found about 4 in 10 voters said it was the most important issue facing the country.

Trump’s attack was designed for a different political era, when “communist” could still be used as a stand-in for danger and decline. But in a campaign shaped by grocery bills, rent and inflation, the sharper question was whether voters would treat that language as a warning or as noise.