There is a through line from Senator Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump, and the connector is Roy Cohn. Cohn was McCarthy’s chief counsel during the senator’s anti-communism hearings. Cohn would go on to be a mentor and lawyer for Donald Trump in the 1970s. In his actions as president, Trump is following his mentor Cohn’s playbook and taking on the mantle of McCarthy, using similar strategies and tools that the Wisconsin senator used in his infamous investigations. It was Republican senator, Margaret Chase Smith who called out McCarthy and the weaker Republicans of her time who failed to stand up to him in her famous Declaration of Conscience speech “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”
Chase Smith’s observations should be a clarion call to the Republican Party today, but sadly, the truth seems to be no match for the lies Trump and his sycophants in congress prefer to tell. The crumbling of our independent and critical journalistic infrastructure has given way to a corporate media that cannot or will not hold the administration accountable to previously accepted national norms. Instead of speaking the truth and referring to Trump’s defiance of court orders as lawlessness, reporters split hairs and treat these actions as some sort of legitimate challenge to judges based on which president appointed them. When journalists refer to a judge as an Obama or Biden appointee they undermine public perception of the judicial independence, the implication being that a judge appointed by a Democrat is somehow incapable of judging Trump fairly. Journalists who report this way are “obeying in advance,” assisting Trump in his attack on an impartial judiciary.
The truth here is that the American people are being fed a steady diet of half truths and full blown lies. Terming the illegal transport of Americans to a prison in El Salvador “deportations” (as the Trump administration has persuaded the American press to do) is exactly the kind of smear that Margaret Chase Smith warned of. Bigotry, ignorance, and fear also rear their heads as Trump persuades a willing press to call the men kidnapped and trafficked to remote prisons without due process “violent criminals” and “alien enemies.” We are well into George Orwell territory these days. Orwell’s prediction that this would take place in 1984 was off by a few decades, but in that prescient book he almost perfectly captures the outcome of Trump’s Project 2025:
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
— George Orwell, 1984
What is today’s truth, and who will have the courage to speak it?