I have said here before that I believe Donald Trump\u2019s reign will end like Humpty Dumpty\u2019s: suddenly, fiercely and irrevocably. I still believe that, but today I\u2019d like to offer a better example, one from American history: U.S. Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s lives with abandon but without proof, and in many cases even without evidence. His career path may remind you of someone. A quick recap:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201csex crimes\u201d made them vulnerable to blackmail by communists.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
McCarthy\u2019s 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, \u201cHave you no sense of decency, sir?\u201d
\nThat 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 \u201ccontrary to Senate traditions,\u201d and after that they mostly ignored him until his term ended in disgrace.<\/p>\n
McCarthy’s disgrace and condemnation were so great that a term named after him — McCarthyism \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Does any of that ring a bell?<\/p>\n
But even though McCarthy\u2019s barbarism was cruel and inexcusable, it doesn\u2019t compare with Trump\u2019s. 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<\/p>\n