A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Following the horrific murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump has blamed what he calls the “radical left” for political violence in the United States and has vowed to demolish it. Of course, Trump is peddling BS when he insists the left bears sole responsibility for violence while any emerging from the right is excusable. But his rhetoric never clarifies: Who is this “radical left” Trump seeks to stamp out? His use of this term has been rather elastic, affording him the leeway to pursue anyone he considers an opponent or detractor.
Even, possibly, you.
I asked Perplexity AI to help me determine when Trump first began assailing the “radical left.” It could not pinpoint the original instance, but the chatbot noted that during a press conference after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in which one woman was killed—the event had prompted Trump to refer to “very fine people on both sides”—he remarked, “What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any assemblage of guilt?” At the time, ABC News reported, “It’s unclear what he meant by the ‘alt-left.’”
Before this audience of Kirk devotees, Trump insisted Democrats in charge of big cities were aligned with the “radical agenda” of the “radical left.”
During a June 22, 2020, speech at a conference held by Kirk’s Turning Point USA—in the wake of protests against police brutality that erupted across the country following the killing of George Floyd—Trump repeatedly referred to the “radical left.” He hailed the attendees for refusing “to kneel to the radical left.” He declared, “The radical left demands absolute conformity from every professor, researcher, reporter, journalist, corporation, entertainer, politician, campus speaker, and private citizen.” He asserted the “radical left” hate “our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans.” And the “radical left,” he maintained, was “waging war on timeless American values like freedom of speech, which is what we’re just talking about. Anyone who dares to speak the truth is canceled, censored, de-platformed, fired, expelled, harassed, abused, boycotted, deprived of a livelihood, or even physically assaulted.”
Before this audience of Kirk devotees, Trump insisted Democrats in charge of big cities were aligned with the “radical agenda” of the “radical left.” Bedlam, he said, “will come to every city near you, every suburb and community in America, if the radical-left Democrats are put in charge.”
As he campaigned for reelection, he turned the “radical left” into his chief boogeyman. A few months later, in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, Trump, looking to exploit the Floyd protests, which in some cities had been accompanied by looting and violence, once more leaned heavy into this “radical left” pitch. He brayed that the “election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” He excoriated Joe Biden, the Democrats’ nominee, for not possessing “the strength to stand up to wild-eyed Marxists like Bernie Sanders and his fellow radicals.” He warned that Biden was a partner of the “radical left” and that “if the radical left takes power, they will apply their disastrous policies to every city, town, and suburb in America.” Trump was essentially saying the Democrats were a key component of the “radical left.” And it was everywhere!
In four years, according to Trump, the Democrats had shifted from being lapdogs for 1-percenters to being in cahoots with communists. Quite the 180.
Trump’s conflation of the Democratic Party with the “radical left” was a dramatic shift from his 2016 acceptance speech, when he had lashed out at Hillary Clinton for being the “puppet” of “big business, elite media, and major donors.” In four years, according to Trump, the Democrats had shifted from being lapdogs for 1-percenters to being in cahoots with communists. Quite the 180.
During the post-2020 election stretch, when Trump was conniving to overturn the election results and subvert the republic, he relied on this trope to whip up his base and sell his lie. He blamed the “radical left” for having rigged the contest against him. At the speech he gave on January 6, 2021, which incited the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, he proclaimed, “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media.” Fact-checkers who vetted his social media posts were also part of the “radical left,” he said. And he told the crowd, “The radical left knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re ruthless and it’s time that somebody did something about it.” Put simply, anyone who had a role in the free and fair election that he lost was a member of the “radical left.”
Demonizing an amorphous “radical left” and linking it to the Democrats did not win the election for Trump, but he stuck to this line of attack when he ran for the White House again. On Veterans Day in 2023, at a rally in New Hampshire, he gave a speech that historians compared to those of Hitler and Mussolini. “We pledge to you,” he bellowed, “that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He added, “The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. It’s growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
After Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in the summer of 2024, Trump blasted her as a “radical left lunatic.” Months later in an interview with Fox News, he raised the prospect of “radical left lunatics” disrupting the election and noted they could be “easily handled” by the National Guard or US military. He also branded Democrats like then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the first impeachment against Trump, as “lunatics” and part of “the enemy within.” He called them “more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
Trump’s goal is to cast as wide a net as possible to vilify his critics and political foes. If Kamala Harris is a radical leftist, then just about every Democrat is a radical leftist—and a prime target for their new Red Scare.
It’s no shocker that Trump’s use of derogatory and dangerous language is imprecise. He and his MAGA henchmen rail against antifa—but they can’t define it. (Does it even have an office or PO box?) Last week, he proclaimed that it was a “major terrorist organization” and should be designated as such. On Monday, Trump signed an executive order labeling antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.” But the significance of this was unclear, given that antifa is not an organized group and the president does not have the legal authority to declare a domestic entity a terrorist group.
Obviously, Trump’s goal is to cast as wide a net as possible to vilify his critics and political foes. If Kamala Harris is a radical leftist, then just about every Democrat is a radical leftist—and a prime target for their new Red Scare. Trump is trying mightily to delegitimize the Democrats and all political opposition. White House aide Stephen Miller recently snarled on Fox that the Democratic Party “is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” He called Democrats “evil.” Anyone associated with the party is the enemy deserving of Trump’s wrath.
This is an old playbook. Since the days of McCarthyism, the right has endeavored to portray liberals and Democrats as intimately tied to radicalism or godless communism. Nixon did that in the 1960s. During the 1980s, there was a cottage industry of conservative media outlets and nonprofits that concocted elaborate wire diagrams seeking to show that Soviet-funded organizations were connected to left-wing groups in the US that were tied to mainstream liberals and Democrats.
Right-wing commentator Glenn Beck did something similar during the Obama years, with chaotic chalkboard scribbles and flow charts that supposedly depicted a vast left-wing conspiracy that ran from the far left straight into the Oval Office with predictable detours involving billionaire philanthropist George Soros. (A gunman on his way to attack the offices of a foundation at the center of Beck’s byzantine conspiracy theory was stopped by police officers and apprehended after a furious shootout.) And Sarah Palin claimed Obama had been “palling around with terrorists.” Now Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and their MAGA conspirators claim they are going to smash the networks of the “radical left” and everyone to which it is linked.
Trump grouses that he’s the victim of witch hunts every time he’s the subject of an investigation. He now seems determined to launch his own, as part of a huge smear campaign that equates Democrats with violent extremists. When anyone he considers a political threat can be called the “radical left,” anyone can become a target of the assault to come.
