The Malice of Trumpism Exceeds that of McCarthyism

Trumpism is on track to exceed McCarthyism in duration and destructiveness. A coordinated mass counter-movement may be forming. It can’t come too soon. It may already be too late.

Evicted from a dinner in honor of Vice President Richard Nixon in 1956, Senator Joe McCarthy was found by a reporter in a Milwaukee alley, crying uncontrollably, now a shunned reprobate. Packing away a bottle of vodka a day, he sank deeper into paranoia, even imagining that he was being pursued by snakes. In late April 1957, he entered Bethesda Naval Hospital with yellow jaundiced skin and most of his liver shot, and died at 48. Stripped of his powerful subcommittee chair, censured and shunned by his Senate colleagues, McCarthy, who rode a wave of communist witch-hunting in the early 1950s, is viewed by historians today as a loathed and aberrant figure, a prime example of abuse of power.

McCarthy finally met his comeuppance when a principled government lawyer publicly challenged him with “Have you no sense of decency?” As Donald Trump resumes taking a wrecking ball to American democracy, now extending his malicious reach to the economy, many are asking, when will his bubble burst? When will this latter-day Joe McCarthy finally be exposed for the fraud he is and banished to a well-deserved back alley, universally shunned and shamed?

Our current zeitgeist shares much in common with that of the early 1950s. Millions of credulous Americans believe that evil elites are conniving to destroy their country. They cheer on opportunistic politicians who play into the superstitions by zealously chasing phantoms conjured up by fevered minds: “deep state,” “Satan-worshiping child sex trafficking elites,” etc. Americans of both eras also enjoyed a booming economy (until Trump’s tariffs). No Weimar-type destitution and runaway inflation can be blamed for today’s far right extremism.

The historian Richard Hofstadter studied this phenomenon at length in his 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

[I]n a populistic culture like ours...a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

Trumpism is on track to exceed McCarthyism in terms of duration and malice. McCarthy’s reign of terror ran about seven years. Trump, with four disastrous years under his belt, has just embarked on another four with unprecedented destructiveness; if he makes it through his entire second term, his misrule will have exceeded McCarthy’s tenure by a year. And the damage to human lives is already surpassing that done by the senator with migrants snatched from the streets without warrants and deported to a foreign gulag. Among these are legal residents and American citizen children. The abrupt termination of foreign aid is bringing on the deaths of thousands overseas. Curtailment of social welfare and health sector mismanagement may have the same devastating effect at home.

While the negative impact of McCarthyism haunts us to this day, the political, societal and economic damage of Trumpism is likely to be deeper, more far-reaching and potentially irreparable.

Autocrats fit a universal template regardless of ideology. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, the North Korean Kims and history’s other malefactors share cult of personality, inflicting human misery, oppression and destructiveness on a massive scale. The shared characteristics of Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump are striking:

• Trump and McCarthy both burst on the political scene as non-mainstream Republicans with a bombastic style all their own.

• Both dominated the news cycle with one outrageous claim after another, inserting distractions whenever their lies were challenged, thereby unsettling the national conversation and overturning political norms.

• Millions of Americans became captivated by the spectacle. At his peak, McCarthy enjoyed a 50 percent approval rating; Trump came close to that mark during his first term.

• Both sharply divided the nation. Republicans solidly backed each politician or cowered from criticizing them.

• Trump’s Big Lie concerning the 2020 election follows closely the McCarthyite line: conspiring elites, behind-the-scenes corruption, the threat of an imminent usurpation of power by radical leftists.

• Both men share a sociopathic personality and aberrant behavior fostering a right-wing assault against core democratic values.

• Both men cared little about the human damage their baseless accusations inflicted.

• McCarthy and Trump were counseled by the same unprincipled lawyer, Roy Cohn.

McCarthyism scholar Ellen Schrecker notes that “Mainstream institutions like universities, bar associations, the press, the labor movement and the entertainment industry not only shrank from confronting McCarthyism, but all too often collaborated with it by imposing sanctions on the individuals identified as politically undesirable.” In her 1986 book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Schrecker writes, “The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” My alma mater, Columbia University, having submitted to Trump’s extreme demands, leads the roster of shame for academia. Harvard, on the other hand, shines, having rejected them.

McCarthyism created what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called “the black silence of fear.”

Today it seems that we are watching a re-run from the 1950s: media corporations, major law firms, universities, labor unions, corporations and entertainment giants have succumbed to Trump’s bullying, including ditching DEI measures. A black silence of fear has returned to American institutions.

Trump and his partner-in-crime, Elon Musk, however, appear to be exceeding McCarthy in sheer destruction of government structures and services.

McCarthy’s attacks on federal agencies resulted in thousands losing their jobs. But the main target was the U.S. State Department. His baseless claims that U.S. diplomats sold out China to the communists led to a purge of the Foreign Service ranks. The department’s cadre of East Asia experts was so depleted by McCarthy’s purges that by the time the Vietnam War heated up, there were few senior officials with relevant regional experience to moderate policy.

One of McCarthy’s victims, Medal of Freedom-winning Foreign Service officer John Paton Davies, Jr. wrote, “The violence and subtlety of the purge and intimidation left the Foreign Service demoralized and intellectually cowed. With some doughty exceptions, it became a body of conformists…and many cautious mediocrities rose to the top of the Service.” It took decades before American diplomats shook off their collective PTSD from this period.

There is no exact tally of the number of federal workers illegally fired by the Trump-Musk regime. And it will take many years to assess the damage in terms of degraded government services, financial costs, moral costs and national security damage. With four more years of this scale of senseless nihilism, America may never recover and a new Pax Sinica could dominate the globe for many decades to come.

After 1954, McCarthy was hard-pressed to find mainstream news outlets willing to spread his lies. Times have changed vastly. Trump has at his beck and call a sprawling right-wing mediaverse as well as social media more than willing to spew his hate and falsehoods. And he maintains an uncanny grip on a vast swath of citizens who, blind to reality, remain fervent followers of his cult, and they are better organized than during his first term. While the Trump cult is finite given the actuarial tables, “the paranoid style as a force in politics” persists in this country. Its presence is merely a matter of degree.

The Senate finally voted to condemn Joe McCarthy in 1954 for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions.” Collective courage and collective action are required to take down an aspiring despot like Donald Trump. As scholar Ellen Schrecker notes, “Without a long-term commitment to intensive grassroots organizing, that chance to reclaim the United States from bigots and oligarchs may fade away. It has done so before.” With the proliferation of growing grassroots demonstrations we are seeing throughout the country, however, a coordinated mass movement may be forming. It can’t come too soon. It may already be too late.