It is not because of Donald Trump that the Republican Party is associated with the color red (for that you can largely thank George W. Bush and the state of Florida), but few Republicans have embraced the color as enthusiastically as have Trump and his followers. Trump’s branding skills might be overstated, but he has made red baseball caps an unusually potent political signifier.

To someone of a certain age — like, say, 78 — red was at one point associated more firmly with the Soviet Union and communism more broadly. (That it aligned with the GOP only after the fall of the U.S.S.R. is probably not a coincidence.) A “red” was someone believed to hold views antithetical to the United States, someone to be uprooted from 1950s society and government.

It’s interesting, then, to see Trump lean into the idea that the nation faces a new communist threat — one that even his supporters aren’t convinced exists.

On Monday afternoon, hours before the Democratic convention kicked off in Chicago, Trump — in his inimitable fashion — presented a sweeping argument against the left.

After President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, he wrote on his social media platform that he has to beat “a Radical Left Marxist, Comrade Kamala Harris.” He added that “the good news is that she should be easier … to beat than Crooked Joe in that the USA will never allow itself to become a Communist Country.”

This is hardly the first time he’s made such a claim. In 2016, he regularly disparaged Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as a communist. During the 2020 election, he took to describing the left and Biden as advocates of socialism or Marxism or communism, or all of them. There wasn’t much differentiation; each was a term of disparagement understood as such, in particular by Americans who lived through the Cold War.

Something interesting happened in 2020, in fact. Usually, search interest in “communism” follows a regular pattern, dropping in the summer and rising through the fall before peaking in the spring. There’s an obvious explanation for this: Communism generally comes up as a topic of conversation in school.

The year of the coronavirus pandemic, there was an anomaly: Searches for “communism” remained relatively high through the summer. This was certainly in part because restrictions on activity aimed at limiting the spread of the virus were compared to the heavy-handed tactics of communist regimes. It’s probably also related to the virus’s point of origin. Use of the term “Chinese Communist Party” to refer to China’s government surged in the wake of the pandemic.

Trump’s campaign was deliberate about highlighting the idea that Democrats endorsed communism in part because of whom the campaign was targeting that November. The Republican convention featured a Cuban-born immigrant warning about the risk of America collapsing into a communist system like the one he’d escaped. On Election Day, Trump beat expectations in South Florida, home to many Cuban American expats who were the target of that message.

By late 2023, though, it was clear that Americans weren’t really worried about the idea that the country was on the brink of collapsing into a communist dictatorship. YouGov asked Americans specifically about the likelihood of such a shift in the next 10 years. A surprisingly large percentage of people said it was likely, but most people described such a change as not very likely or not likely at all.

The group most likely to say it could happen was Republicans. But only a quarter of Trump’s party indicated that this was somewhat or very likely. And this was nearly three years into Biden’s presidency.

Again, it’s very unlikely that Trump is arguing that Harris, if elected, would establish communes in which people would collectively own systems of production. He’s instead raising the specter of left-wing authoritarianism — explicitly as a response to the left’s suggestions that he would seek to establish a right-wing authoritarian state. (“THE DEMOCRATS ARE, ‘A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY?’” his social media post concluded in his idiosyncratic style.) Trump, of course, has repeatedly embraced other right-wing authoritarians and actively endorsed erosions of liberal democracy, making the rejoinder more than a little specious.

It’s been noted that Trump is largely a product of the 1980s, and that holds true here. In 1984, about the worst thing you could call someone was a communist. In 2024, that’s about the worst thing Trump can gin up, too.

“Fact: Trump announced a budget to cut Social Security and Medicare every single year he was in office.”

— tweet by the Harris-Walz campaign, Aug. 14

“Remember he tried to cut Medicare every year he was president, threatening a program that tens of millions of seniors count on.”

— Vice President Kamala Harris, remarks in Raleigh, N.C., Aug. 16

Expect to hear some version of these claims throughout the Democratic National Convention and for the rest of the election season. Donald Trump has repeatedly said he will not touch Social Security and Medicare if he is reelected, despite a financial crunch in the coming decade, and this attack line is intended to show that his promise cannot be trusted.

Trump has rarely been consistent on policy, so it’s a matter of opinion whether he would keep his promise. But this attack is misleading. His proposed “cuts” to Medicare in the budgets for the fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 were intended to save money and extend the solvency of the program — and were mostly borrowed from the Obama administration. Trump also did not propose changes to Social Security retirement benefits in those budgets; instead he sought (relatively minor) savings from the Social Security disability program.

Let’s look in more detail.

The Facts

Both political parties make misleading claims about Medicare “cuts,” depending on which party holds the presidency.

The game is played this way: When a president’s budget is released, politicians from the opposing party will claim that any difference over 10 years between anticipated Medicare spending (what is known as the “baseline”) and changes in law intended to reduce spending are devastating “cuts” that will harm seniors who rely on the old-age program.

Politicians (and reporters) usually discuss the numbers —“$350 billion in cuts” — with little context. Medicare is such a huge program — more than $10 trillion over 10 years — that a figure like that amounts to a relatively small percentage.

The overheated rhetoric also ignores this reality: Virtually all of these anticipated savings would be wrung from health providers, not Medicare beneficiaries. Hospitals and doctors object, sometimes vehemently, but often these are good-government reforms intended to make Medicare run more efficiently and with lower costs.

Given the strength of hospital and doctor lobbies, it’s difficult to enact such changes. Barack Obama borrowed a lot of his ideas for squeezing providers from George W. Bush’s budgets. Then Trump borrowed Obama’s unfilled requests — such as charging the same rate for office visits whether a doctor works at a hospital or elsewhere — and put them in his budgets. Trump didn’t have much luck either. In any case, even if provider cuts are enacted, Congress later will sometimes halt or reduce the changes in response to political pressure.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which seeks to lower the budget deficit, closely studied the Trump proposals each year.

“The basic argument here is quite ridiculous,” he said of the Harris-Walz campaign tweet. Goldwein noted that the Inflation Reduction Act, in which Harris cast the tiebreaking vote for passage, also reduced health-care costs for Medicare, such as through inflation caps. “By the same logic, you could say Joe Biden cut Medicare.”

The budget group in 2019 estimated that 85 percent of Trump’s proposed Medicare savings came from provider reductions, “many of which closely resemble or build upon proposals made in President Obama’s budgets” and would lower costs for seniors. “Another 5 percent of the savings, by our estimate, would come from policies that reduce overall health care costs and improve Medicare’s finances as a side effect.” The remainder of the savings came from the benefit design for Medicare’s prescription drug program, which the group said would reduce costs for some seniors (especially those using generic drugs) and increase it for others.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning group that studies the impact of budget policies, broadly agreed with that assessment in 2020, noting that some of the ideas to address overpayments to providers were borrowed from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a congressional agency.

“Most of these proposals would have reduced payments to providers and not affected beneficiaries directly. Most are also repeats from prior years, since they were not enacted,” said Paul N. Van de Water, a senior fellow at the center who specializes in Medicare and Social Security, in an email.

Van de Water said he believed that an executive order on Medicare issued by Trump in 2019 would have weakened Medicare and its financing, especially its promotion of private Medicare Advantage plans and a proposal to increase payments to providers. But those proposals were not contained in the budget.

Just over half of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, compared to traditional Medicare, which is run by the government and favored by Democrats. The Project 2025 plan issued by the Heritage Foundation — which Trump has sought to distance himself from but which was engineered by many former Trump administration officials, among others — recommends promoting Medicare Advantage plans.

As for Social Security, Trump kept his promise not to touch retirement benefits, bucking longtime efforts by Republicans to raise the retirement age. (In a 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” published when Trump sought the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, Trump also made an emphatic case for a higher retirement age.)

But Trump did seek, without success, to reduce spending for Social Security Disability Insurance as well as Supplemental Security Income, which is administered by the Social Security Administration. The number of people who receive disability benefits, 8.5 million, is one-seventh the size of the pool who receive retirement and survivor benefits.

Goldwein said that the reductions generally were intended to make the programs more efficient, such as eliminating double payments of both unemployment insurance and disability (also sought by Obama). He also said the proposals were relatively small.

“The President’s budget identifies programmatic changes that would reduce Social Security spending by $25 billion, or less than 0.2 percent over a decade,” the Committee for a Responsible Budget wrote in 2018. “Importantly, most of these changes are meant to reduce overlapping or improper payments and address certain inequities in the program. … Just over half of the savings come from policies also proposed by President Obama in his own budgets.”

The fiscal 2019 budget also claimed it would get another $48 billion in savings from vague pilot programs intended to reduce disability spending, but that was dismissed as a budget gimmick. The Congressional Budget Office concluded no savings would result.

Still, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities said some of the proposals, never implemented, could have cut in half the retroactive benefits that disabled workers may receive — a potential $7,500 average loss — and would have reduced benefits for families in which more than one member qualifies for SSI.

In response to our findings, Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello defended the tweet’s phrasing, citing a Washington Post report published during the GOP primary campaign that said each of Trump’s White house budget proposals “included cuts to Social Security and Medicare programs.” (The Post article, which examined various GOP candidates’ past positions, did not explain that those proposed Trump White House program cuts primarily affected providers, not beneficiaries.)

“Donald Trump has repeatedly attempted to cut Social Security and Medicare after repeatedly promising the American people that he won’t cut those exact programs,” Costello said in a statement. “In his 2016 campaign, he pledged, ‘I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare.’ But sure enough, as president, just ‘like every other Republican,’ Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. So no matter how much he lies today, Trump’s own record makes clear that he will gut critical benefits for millions of Americans if he takes power.”

The Pinocchio Test

The Harris-Walz campaign is being disingenuous and misleading. Virtually all of Trump’s proposed Medicare “cuts” were good-government efforts intended to reduce costs and put the program on a sounder financial footing, with some ideas even borrowed from Obama. The campaign has a slightly stronger case for claiming Social Security cuts, as Trump proposed some changes in programs for people on disability. Still, they were relatively minor. Trump kept his promise not to mess with retirement and survivor benefits — the core of Social Security.

This rhetoric is worthy of Three Pinocchios.

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Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent anti-price-gouging push has met with significant skepticism from policy analysts and even some normally politically aligned commentators.

They’ve suggested that her somewhat vague “federal ban on price gouging” to combat inflation is unworkable, counterproductive, a “gimmick” and pandering. Many have noted that Richard M. Nixon tried price controls in August 1971, and it went poorly.

In fact, Nixon had just months earlier privately conceded that price controls — and I’m skipping over some Nixonian colorful language here — “will not work.” But he pressed forward anyway, apparently for political reasons.

The Nixon comparison isn’t totally apt, and Harris seemed to temper her proposal somewhat when it was actually rolled out.

But there’s a reason Nixon pulled a 180, and there’s clearly a political reason for Harris to play up this issue, pander or not.

It’s because lots and lots of Americans blame price gouging for inflation. (Whether such gouging actually exists is a point of contention, but the Federal Trade Commission has said some large grocery chains have increased prices more than needed to cover extra costs.)

And lots and lots of Americans like the idea of the federal government doing something about it. That appears to include when you use the language favored by its critics, “price controls.”

Americans blame lots of things for inflation. But price gouging is perhaps the perceived culprit where the most bipartisan consensus emerges.

A late 2021 Fox News poll showed 75 percent of Americans blamed “price gouging by companies” at least somewhat. That was nearly as much as the 78 percent that blamed the most obvious culprit, the coronavirus pandemic.

About 4 in 10 Republicans, Democrats and independents agreed that price gouging was “very responsible” for inflation. And independents were more apt to blame price gouging than they were to blame even President Joe Biden.

More recent polling suggests price gouging has grown as a boogeyman:

• A YouGov survey released in July 2023 showed Americans’ No. 1 inflation offender — out of 11 factors mentioned — was “large corporations seeking maximum profits.” Even 44 percent of Republicans blamed that “a lot.”
• A late 2023 Ipsos/Yahoo Finance poll showed price gouging was independents’ top culprit among seven options.
• And a Financial Times/Michigan Ross poll this year showed those blaming large corporations for charging more amid inflation rising from 54 percent six months earlier to 63 percent. That was significantly more than the 38 percent who blamed Democrats’ policies.

Americans also see government action as both effective and desirable.

That YouGov poll showed about half of Americans thought that having the government set price limits (51 percent) and fining companies for price gouging (49 percent) would at least probably decrease inflation. Significantly fewer — about 3 in 10 — felt these ideas wouldn’t work. (The rest offered no opinion.)

The only ideas perceived as being more effective, out of 16 tested, were increasing oil production and investing in the supply chain — and only marginally so.

Just because people think these things would work doesn’t necessarily mean they want them, of course. There is risk in Harris’s proposal looking heavy-handed and too big-government. Donald Trump over the weekend labeled Harris’s idea “SOVIET Style Price Controls.”

But people do say they want such measures — even when you characterize them as “price controls.”

A late 2023 CBS News/YouGov poll asked whether people approved of “government price controls — that is, laws that limit the amount that companies can raise prices, or charge for products and services.”

Americans approved nearly 2-to-1, and even a majority of Republicans (56 percent) approved.

You begin to see why such a proposal, however practical or seriously intended, would have appeal for the Harris campaign. It’s not just a potent boogeyman; it’s a potent boogeyman that deflects blame from the administration that has been in charge these past 3½ years.

And the Harris campaign has surely demonstrated a willingness to play up the populism and take some liberties in its appeals to voters.

Its recent plan to get rid of taxes on tips — after Trump proposed a different version of the same thing — appeared calculated to offset any potential benefit Trump might glean in Nevada, a swing state featuring many service workers. But some experts say neither proposal is likely to be enacted, and they’re skeptical they’d even work.

Judging by these numbers, Harris might have just one-upped Trump on the populism.

CHICAGO — The Ukrainian Village, a neighborhood nestled only a mile north and slight jog west of the United Center, where Democrats are convening this week, is the heart of the Ukrainian diaspora in Chicago — a compact enclave of faith, hope, resilience, anxiety, fear and a notably transformed political sensibility shaped by old memories and the harsh reality of the Russian invasion of the homeland.

Reminders of that war are everywhere here, more than 5,000 miles from the battlefield. It might be the other war, the largely forgotten war, in much of America and the world, overshadowed by the bloody events in Gaza that are drawing all the noise and protest now, but to the people of Ukrainian Village, it is never far from mind.

The war in Ukraine torments Oksana Ambroz, a fashion designer whose bitter feelings about Russia go back to stories about her father. At age 2, starved and weakened by the Holodomor, the Soviet-caused famine of 1932, he was thrown into a mass trench by Russian soldiers and left to die before his horrified mother pulled him to safety. The war haunts Slava Pillyuyko, a psychiatrist who each night calls his friends and family in the Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi, trying to help them deal with the trauma of constant shelling. If they drink, he said, they now drink more; if they had insomnia before, they now sleep even less, never knowing whether the next day will be their last.

Walk the streets of the Ukrainian Village and feel the sorrow of a distant war. “Stop Putin, Stop War” posters in storefront windows. Flower-bedecked memorial crosses in churchyards. Blue and yellow flags fluttering in the late summer breeze. Photo exhibits of wounded soldiers and uprooted families in the museum. Pockets of newly arrived refugees huddling outside a building that offers relocation assistance. And endless discussions in English and Ukrainian, about the war — what is happening from Kursk to Kyiv, what might happen next, and what the 2024 presidential tickets are doing and saying about it all.

Despair here over Republican diffidence, or outright dismissal, of Ukrainian pleas for support in fighting Russian aggression has rearranged the political landscape. “This area used to be totally Republican,” said Marta Farion, vice president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, who lives across the street from the Sts. Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church and has visited Ukraine 55 times. The dominant viewpoint was conservative and staunchly anti-communist. “Ronald Reagan was revered here,” she said. “When he said ‘Tear down this wall!’ he was speaking for all of us who suffered under the Soviets.”

But even as Ukrainian Villagers remain culturally conservative and generally receptive to GOP positions on abortion and crime, they saw a vast distance between the old party of Reagan and the party that President Donald Trump has refashioned as more isolationist.

Many expressed dismay over Trump’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin and the way as Trump seemed to trust the autocrat’s propaganda more than the findings of U.S. intelligence services. They blamed recalcitrant Republicans in the House for delaying U.S. aid that Ukraine desperately needed. “Each of those six months added hundreds more killed,” Pillyuyko lamented. And then came Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, who once was quoted as saying, “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

If Trump returns to the White House, Farion said, she feared that “he will sell Ukraine down the pike. He says he will end the war right away, but that only means he will make a deal with Putin. We know he is going to make a deal with Putin. … The future of Ukraine is on the line in this election.”

Farion spoke while seated at a round table in the basement cafeteria of Sts. Volodymyr and Olha after a Sunday service, not far from a spread of Ukrainian pastries. Dozens of parishioners were drinking coffee and eating desserts at nearby tables. Seated next to Farion was Chrystya Wereszczak, vice chair of the church council, who nodded her head in agreement, then said, “It will be the biggest desecration in U.S. history of the defense of freedom.”

Wereszczak was quick to add that the neighborhood still had many Republicans who came to the party because of its opposition to abortion and strong history of anti-communism. “But a lot say either they’re not going to vote or not vote for Trump.” Illinois has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992 and is expected to continue its streak this fall.

At the Ukrainian National Museum across the street from the church, Ambroz and Pillyuyko work as volunteer tour guides. Ambroz, who arrived in America penniless in 1997 and built her own design company from scratch, had just returned from a month’s visit to see her son and other relatives in Kyiv. She came away with a renewed sense of hope and deep admiration for her people. “I am so proud of Ukrainians as humans, and the very heroic way they’ve endured, these little acts that reveal the most about them.”

She talked about how the elevators in her nephew’s apartment had little boxes on the floor filled with water and crackers and anxiety medications in case people were trapped in them when Kyiv officials felt the need to turn the electricity off, which happened almost every day. When it did, she would walk up the 19 floors to the apartment just like everyone else. And she recalled the time when a missile exploded between two nearby buildings and blew out all the windows of the first-floor coffee shop. “It happened at 3 in the morning, and by 9, the people had cleaned out all the glass and replaced it with plastic so the shop could open again. Little things like that, acts of resilience every day.”

When Ambroz returned to the United States, she fell back into the habit of searching for news about Ukraine at all hours. “I look before I go to bed at night. I wake up at 3 to try to get the latest. And then I look again when I wake up for good at 7. I can never get enough information.”

Generations of mistreatment shaped her antipathy toward Russia, she said. Her grandfather, an economist, spent eight years in a Soviet prison. Other relatives on her mother’s side disappeared into Siberia and were never heard from again. This family history shaped her politics. She became an American citizen 15 years ago and has voted in every election since. “This country has always supported freedom and the soldiers of Ukraine are fighting for freedom,” Ambroz said. “I will vote for whoever will fight for freedom.”

Pillyuyko, the psychiatrist, who was also a national billiards champion in Ukraine, arrived in Chicago in 2022, only five days before the war started. His take on American politics was subtle and complicated. He said he was reluctant to criticize Trump and Vance because he was not yet a U.S. citizen, but added, “If they are elected, it will be more difficult.” He appreciated the support that President Joe Biden has given his homeland, fearing that without it, the death toll would be in the millions, then added, “But none of this might have happened if Obama had responded more strongly when Putin seized Crimea 10 years ago, so it’s not perfect on any side. But Ukrainians are grateful to the world anyway. Putin said he’d have Kyiv in three days. It’s now getting near three years.”

From his home in Chicago, after hearing harrowing stories in his phone calls to Ukraine, he tries to keep his mood in balance by listening to progressive rock, especially Jethro Tull and Genesis, and searching for humor on social media. When he finds something good, he sends it back home. “I need it. They need it. We all need it,” he said.

CHICAGO — In 2016 Hillary Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention as the barrier-busting standard-bearer — the presidential nominee who many supporters felt was on track to shatter what she has called “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.”

On Monday night, Clinton will return to the convention stage in a different role — the candidate who lost to Donald Trump eight years ago and is now emblematic of a unrealized goal suddenly resurrected with the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s a bittersweet moment for many Democrats, who are eager to “finish the job,” as some of them put it this week.

“It’s about the unfinished business of electing a woman president,” said former Clinton adviser Mini Timmaraju, who leads a national abortion rights group. She said Clinton alums grew emotional at a reception the other night in Chicago and noted that some are playing leading roles in the effort to get Harris elected president.

Along with Clinton, the first night of the convention will feature President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden in the spotlight. Clinton’s speech will cap decades of appearances at Democratic conventions, where she has worn many hats — speaking as first lady when Bill Clinton was president in 1996, as a rising candidate herself in 2000, as a vanquished presidential contender in 2008, as the nominee in 2016 and as a party elder in 2020.

Now she is playing a supporting role for another woman going up against Trump. She and her husband endorsed Harris almost immediately after Biden dropped out of the 2024 race. Harris’s sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has intensified some parallels to 2016, even as Harris puts less emphasis on her gender than Clinton did.

“She’s got a lot of wisdom that can be imparted,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said of Clinton, “and I’m sure she’s excited to see another woman nominated.” Dingell said she is also happy to see a woman become the presidential nominee but added: “I’m looking forward to the day that we stop looking at someone’s gender.”

Clinton’s 2016 loss to Trump was a stinging blow for many Democrats, who looked at some pre-election polls with confidence and felt she was poised for victory. Since then, she has occupied a complicated place in the party — a respected figure but one associated with a painful moment that set off plenty of debate about Democrats’ strategy and direction, as well as the influence of sexism in politics. Some Democrats viewed Clinton as a political albatross and worked to distance themselves from her in subsequent elections.

She remains a polarizing figure and a villain for Republicans. As doubts mounted this summer about Biden’s ability to lead the ticket, Trump advisers gleefully promoted the long-shot idea that Clinton could take his place.

Clinton has been a fixture of Democratic conventions since the 1990s. A video clip of her clapping along enthusiastically to the “Macarena” at the 1996 convention — when she was first lady — continues to amuse the internet and resurfaced on social media ahead of her latest convention appearance.

In multiple speeches, she has nodded to the trailblazing nature of her political career. In 2008 — as the vanquished primary rival unifying behind Barack Obama — she noted, “My mother was born before women could vote,” and said, “My daughter got to vote for her mother for president.” In 2016, she declared, “We just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet.”

In a memoir after Trump’s victory in 2016, Clinton acknowledged making mistakes but also blamed factors beyond her control, said she felt she was “shivved” and suggested she could not explain many voters’ distaste for her.

“Why am I seen as such a divisive figure and, say, Joe Biden and John Kerry aren’t?” she wrote. “They’ve cast votes of all kinds, including some they regret, just like me? What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.”

Trump launched deeply personal attacks against Clinton, at times zeroing in on her gender and accusing her of playing the “woman’s card” in her career; the GOP nominee has taken a similar tone with Harris, mocking her name, laugh and intelligence and calling her weak.

In 2020, Clinton reemerged to speak at the Democratic convention as Biden challenged Trump. She focused on promoting Biden’s and then-vice-presidential pick Harris’s records over Trump’s and said little about her gutting loss four years earlier.

She briefly flicked at Harris’s historic role as the first Black and Indian American woman on a major-party presidential ticket.

“Tonight I am thinking of the girls and boys who see themselves in America’s future because of Kamala Harris — a Black woman, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, and our nominee for vice president,” Clinton said. “This is our country’s story: breaking down barriers and expanding the circle of possibility.”

Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All and former national women’s vote director for Clinton’s campaign, argued that Clinton helped awaken a “sleeping giant of American women’s political power” that has been on stark display since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

She said her 79-year-old mother was so enthusiastic about Clinton that she cast a write-in vote for her in the 2008 general election. Now she is eager to hear from Clinton. For some women in her mother’s generation who weren’t sure they would ever see a woman president, Timmaraju said, Clinton is a reminder of “the unfinished business of their life.”

YORK, Pa. — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday questioned whether Democrats knew where Vice President Kamala Harris “came from,” reprising a tactic that he has previously used against other Democrats, including former president Barack Obama and women of color in Congress.

Trump also freshly described Harris’s policy positions as a “regulatory jihad,” without explanation, using a loaded Arabic term often translated as holy war. He consistently mispronounced her first name, which her supporters see as demeaning and racist toward Harris, a Black and Indian American woman. At another point, he questioned her upbringing.

“I wonder if they knew where she comes from, where she came from, what her ideology is,” Trump said, referencing Harris’s father, a distinguished Jamaican economist. Harris has said that she was raised primarily by her mother. Donald Harris’s scholarship focuses on international development; Trump misleadingly called him “Marxist,” though it is common for economists to study Karl Marx. Trump made the remarks as part of complaining that Democrats replaced President Joe Biden with Harris on their presidential ticket.

In his comments, Trump echoed his 2019 barb against several Democratic congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) — telling them to “go back” to where they came from. That comment was widely condemned at the time as racist and xenophobic.

Trump rose to prominence in Republican politics more than a decade ago by baselessly questioning Obama’s birthright citizenship, and he has also spread false challenges to Harris’s eligibility to be vice president. Last week, he defined his own task in running against Harris since she took Biden’s place in the race last month as portraying her as “a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”

“Even though she was born in the U.S. to U.S. citizens, the phrase ‘where she comes from’ has been used by Trump to call into question the citizenship status of non-white colleagues,” Jennifer Wingard, an associate professor at the University of Houston who specializes in political rhetoric, wrote in an email. “His yoking the discussion of ‘where she is from’ to her father’s scholarship … Trump is furthering his and the right wing’s idea that those who are not ‘legitimate citizens’ of this country are suspect in not only their presence here, but also their ideals.”

Trump’s continued emphasis on personal insults has dismayed some allies and advisers who have urged him to stick to policy contrasts. Monday’s speech, on a Precision Custom Components factory floor here, was billed as an economic policy address to kick off a week of campaign events opposite the Democratic National Convention. Trump is scheduled to address crime in Michigan on Tuesday, national security in North Carolina on Wednesday and immigration at the Arizona-Mexico border on Thursday.

His economic proposals on Monday were light on specifics. He vowed to halve energy prices, without specifying how he would accomplish that, other than reiterating a promise to expand oil and gas drilling. Domestic production is already at a record high, and prices are set in global markets.

Trump also defended his plans to impose tariffs on foreign goods by mischaracterizing those measures as taxes on foreign countries, when in fact they are paid by American consumers.

He also misrepresented his own economic record and current conditions. Though he claimed that the country was in a “manufacturing recession,” manufacturing employment is higher than it was under Trump, and the United States has added more than 765,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2021. He falsely claimed that he was the first president to raise any federal revenue from import duties on China, when tariffs on China raised between $3 billion and $10 billion annually during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, according to Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank.

“That is another lie about economic policy,” Posen said.

Trump also falsely alleged that Harris plans to sign “illegal aliens” up for Medicare and Social Security. Undocumented immigrants pay into the programs but do not receive payments from them, meaning they help sustain the programs’ solvency. Harris has not produced plans to extend Medicare and Social Security eligibility to undocumented immigrants.

And Trump repeated the baseless accusation of widespread voter registration by undocumented immigrants, an unsubstantiated claim that he has made since at least 2017 to justify his loss of the popular vote in the previous year’s presidential election.

The visit to Pennsylvania was Trump’s second in a three-day span. On Saturday, he held a rally in Wilkes-Barre. The former president is visiting five battleground states this week, in an effort to retake the narrative from Harris, as Democrats gather in Chicago for their national convention.

During his speech, Trump attacked Harris for changing her position on fracking — a method of extracting natural gas form the earth — calling her a “non-fracker.” Harris’s campaign said she now supports it.

York County is a reliably Republican area. Trump won about 62 percent and 61 percent of the vote here in 2016 and 2020, respectively. The county also supported Mitt Romney in 2012, John McCain in 2008, and George W. Bush in 2004 and 2000. While many parts of Pennsylvania away from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have been losing population, York and surrounding counties have gained population in the past decade.

Elsewhere in the state on Monday, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), spoke at a warehouse in northern Philadelphia to deliver his own critique of Harris’s economic proposals.

“She says that on Day 1 she wants to make groceries and homes more affordable for American citizens,” he told a crowd of about 200. “Well, Kamala Harris, where have you been? Because you have been vice president for about 1,300 days. Day 1 was 3½ years ago. You should have been doing your job.”

Vance dismissed recent polls showing a tight race or Harris leading. “I don’t believe the polls when they say that we’re up,” he said. “I don’t believe the polls when they say that we’re tied. I don’t know the polls that say that we’re down.”

LeVine reported from York. Cheeseman reported from Philadelphia. Dan Keating contributed to this report.