Pulitzer-Prize winning author David Halberstam summed up the effectiveness of 1950s Republicans’ smear tactics in his monumental 1972 study of the origins of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest: 

“But if they did not actually stick, and they did not, [Joseph McCarthy’s] charges had an equally damaging effect: They poisoned. Where there was smoke, there must be fire. He wouldn’t be saying these things [voters reasoned] unless there was something to it.” 

Joseph McCarthy

As a whole, Democrats have proven indifferent to or ignorant of the power of effective language.

Donald Trump solicited Russian Communist aid to win the Presidency in 2016 and Chinese Communist aid to retain it in 2020. 

Yet Democrats refused to directly accuse him of treason, as in:

• “TrumPutin”
• “Commissar-in-Chief”
• “Putin’s Poodle”
• “Red Donald”
• “Putin’s Puppet”

The Kremlin

Similarly, the news media has not dared state the obvious: That Trump moved boxes of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate to sell them to America’s enemies in exchange for huge sums to pay his upcoming legal bills. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump repeatedly lied about its lethality and opposed the use of masks and social distancing to combat it. As a result, 400,000 Americans had died by the time he left office.

Yet no Democrat has dared label him “Coronavirus-in-Chief.” 

Nor has the news media directly held him accountable for those deaths.

Tyrants are conspicuously vulnerable to ridicule. Yet in this YouTube-obsessed age, Democrats have proven unable or unwilling to make use of this powerful weapon.  

For example, Trump’s well-established “bromance” with Vladimir Putin could be turned into a parody of the famous song, “Johnny B. Good”:

Way back inside the Kremlin where the lights glow red
There ruled a man named Putin who would poison you dead.
He came up with a plan to make his Russia great
And all it took was bribes and Republican hate.
And Trumpy was a man who couldn’t read or spell
But he could sell out his land just like he’s ringing a bell.

Many of Trump’s fiercest defenders in the House and Senate have taken “campaign contributions” (i.e., bribes) from Russian oligarchs linked to Putin. They could be pointedly attacked by turning the Muppet song, “The Rainbow Connection,” into “The Russian Connection.”   

Why are there so many tales about Russians
And Right-wingers taking bribes?
Russians are Commies and have lots of rubles
For traitors with something to hide. 

So I’ve been told and some choose to believe it
It’s clear as the old KGB.
Someday we’ll find it
The Russian Connection—
The bribers, the traitors—you’ll see. 

Kristi Noem, Trump’s Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, became infamous in 2024 for bragging about shooting her 14-month-old wirehair pointer, “Cricket.” A parody of Marty Robbins’ hit “Big Iron” could easily be turned into a musical indictment of animal cruelty:

Now the woman started talking
Made it plain to folks around
Was a South Dakota Governor
Wouldn’t be too long in town. 

She came here to take a doggie
On a hunt or shoot it dead.
And she said it didn’t matter
She was after Cricket’s head—
After Cricket’s head. 

A continuing theme among Republican politicians is that they are paragons of religious virtue, while Democrats are champions of Satan.

Yet Democrats have done nothing to publicize such truths as:   

• Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is a serial adulterer. 
• Former Speaker Dennis Hastert is a convicted sodomizer of teenage boys.
• Josh Duggar, a Right-wing star of the high-rated “reality” series, 19 Kids and Counting, has been sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for possessing child pornography. 
• Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, has boasted: “Marriage is a wonderful thing and I’m a firm believer in it.” Yet she engaged in open affairs with at least two members of her local gym—for which Perry Greene has divorced her.