I have said here before that I believe Donald Trump’s reign will end like Humpty Dumpty’s: suddenly, fiercely and irrevocably. I still believe that, but today I’d like to offer a better example, one from American history: U.S. Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.
If you were alive in the 1950s, you remember him. Beginning in 1950, he was on the front page of every newspaper every day, destroying people’s lives with abandon but without proof, and in many cases even without evidence. His career path may remind you of someone. A quick recap:
As 1950 dawned, the United States and Russia were locked in the Cold War. Fear that communism was creeping into our government was widespread. In February of that year, McCarthy asserted in a speech that he had a list of “members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring” who were employed in the State Department, and suddenly that nationwide fear spiked.
Two years later McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and of its permanent subcommittee on investigations, and for the next two years he dominated the national spotlight. He constantly claimed that communists, communist sympathizers and Soviet spies had infiltrated the State Department, the Voice of America, the U.S. Army, universities, the film industry and others, including the administrations of both President Truman and President Eisenhower. McCarthy even attacked homosexuals on grounds that their “sex crimes” made them vulnerable to blackmail by communists.
McCarthy never made a plausible case against anyone, but his accusations alone ruined many lives. They drove some persons out of their jobs, brought popular condemnation to others, and probably led to some suicides. Politicians and other likely targets, in and out of government, openly feared him.
McCarthy’s unraveling came suddenly in 1954. It came during a 36-day, nationally televised hearing on his charges that U.S. Army officers and civilian officials had subverted the Army. The hearing exposed to the public his brutal and truculent interrogative tactics, which famously prompted a visibly angry Joseph Nye Welch, special counsel for the Army, to ask McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
That hearing, and those words, fully discredited McCarthy in the eyes of the American people, who became so outraged that they helped make senators feel secure enough to take him on. On Dec. 2, 1954, they voted 67 to 22 to formally condemn him for conduct “contrary to Senate traditions,” and after that they mostly ignored him until his term ended in disgrace.
McCarthy’s disgrace and condemnation were so great that a term named after him — McCarthyism – is used to this day to describe demagogic, reckless and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.
Does any of that ring a bell?
But even though McCarthy’s barbarism was cruel and inexcusable, it doesn’t compare with Trump’s. Trump has openly murdered at least 67 South Americans, been convicted of 34 felonies and reliably charged with 54 more, probably has raped children and certainly knows who has but has not done anything about it, been convicted of sexually abusing a woman in a case that the judge said was rape, and so much more. So, so, so much more
The good news in this horror story is that the public’s growing focus on Trump’s chicanery, loudly expressed through the No Kings rallies and especially through last Tuesday’s elections, appears to be on the verge of forcing Congress to end his reign, just as it did with McCarthy’s. Here’s how:
Since last Tuesday, Trump has been demanding that Republican senators end the government shutdown by killing the Senate filibuster, which would enable them to pass the continuing resolution, the so-called “big beautiful bill” that the House passed on Sept. 19. Trump said that would guarantee Republicans would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” again.
Senate Democrats have made it clear they will not vote for the continuing resolution unless the Republicans agreed to extend permanently the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act markets. Without those credits, millions of Americans will lose healthcare coverage, and healthcare premiums for millions more will skyrocket. About three quarters of Americans want those premium tax credits extended.
Senate Republicans, however, don’t want to end the filibuster for several reasons, but mainly because it could backfire on them. If Democrats were to re-take the Senate and there was no filibuster, they realize, Democrats could rewrite the government however they wished.
Last Friday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) offered a compromise. He said the Democrats would vote to end the government shutdown in exchange for a one-year extension of the expiring premium tax credits and the establishment of a bipartisan committee to figure out how to revise the tax credits so they could continue past next year’s open enrollment period. This would have answered the short-term problems of the increasingly painful government shutdown and skyrocketing premiums and left the question of extending the premium tax credits to voters next year.
That puts Republican senators on the horns of a dilemma. Heather Cox Richardson, who writes the “Letters from an American” newsletter, explained it in these words:
“If Republicans took the deal, the Democrats could claim they had negotiated an end to the shutdown that put into place the popular extensions of the premium tax credits and that called for next year’s midterm voters to decide if they wanted them extended further.
“But if Republicans rejected it, Democrats would be in the position of having offered a reasonable—even a popular—deal that Republicans refused because Trump insisted they must not negotiate. Such an outcome would make the Republicans own the ongoing shutdown.”
And so, not surprisingly Republicans furiously rejected the idea, even though it puts them in the awkward position of refusing to reopen the government so they can kill a measure that is hugely popular with three-quarters of the American people.
Sooner or later, if We the People keep making ourselves known, peacefully but loudly as we have been doing on the streets and at the ballot box, Republicans in Congress will see the handwriting on the wall. Trump is going down, and if they stay with him, they’ll sink too. We the People can help give them the reason and the courage to change course, just as We the People did in the 1950s, and Trump will be impeached. He’ll go down in flames, just like Humpty Dumpty and Joe McCarthy did.
I honestly would not be overly shocked if some exasperated Republican suddenly stood up on the Senate floor one day soon and shouted the truth to Trump at the top of his lungs the words that so many of us are thinking:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
- Political witch hunts and blacklists: Donald Trump and the new era of McCarthyism
- Political Witch Hunts and Blacklists: Donald Trump and the New Era of McCarthyism
- The Media Spawned McCarthyism. Now History Is Repeating Itself
- Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump
- Don’t compare Trump’s US to Nazi Germany. These 3 American moments are more apt.
