As Donald Trump sinks ever deeper into the fetid swamp of failure, his unhinged tweets have scaled new heights of hilarity. One particular posting – a new spasm of delusion about Pennsylvania – has seized my attention: “USB Drives uploaded to machines gave Biden thousands of votes. 47 USB Drives are now missing. EVERY UPLOAD GAVE BIDEN 50,000 VOTES.”
I was struck by the specificity of the number “47,” a little trick that gives a blatant lie the patina of precision. The number “47” sounds a lot truer (at least to credulous saps) than a rounded-off number like “40” or “50.” And then my deja-vu bell began to clang. Didn’t another demagogue pull this same con all the time?
You betcha. Seventy years ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy reached into his damaged mind and came up with “57” communists in the State Department. Sometimes he inflated it to “81,” or whatever fake stat got him a fresh headline in an era when most journalists didn’t bother to fact-check.
Reporter Richard Rovere, who covered McCarthy, later wrote: “He was a fertile innovator, a galvanizer of mobs, and something like a genius at that essential American strategy: publicity…He was able to see that the American mind could easily be bewitched by fraudulent ‘documentation,’ or demonstration, of fraudulent ‘facts,’ or ‘factual’ frauds, and that, once bewitched, it would be nearly impervious to the truths that happened to be truths…The haters rallied round him; at a word from him, their hate glands would puff and swell – fresh supplies of venom would flow into their venom sacs.”
That could’ve been written now, not 61 years ago.
Or check out this take on McCarthy, from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall: “He was at bottom a salesman, an actor, someone for whom accuracy mattered far less than attention, and he had a talent for imagining subversion and conspiracy and for humiliating the scared and vulnerable. A lazy man unwilling to do the work to back up his claims, he relied on allusion and inference…When caught in a lie, he never apologized or recanted; he attacked his accuser or simply moved on to another target.”
The good news, back in 1954, was that McCarthy self-destructed with a big assist from the Senate’s censure and newsman Edward R. Murrow’s epic takedown “(“we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason”). The question before us today is whether McCarthy’s toxic successor will similarly plummet to the point of no return. As we can only hope.
But it’s complicated. Even though McCarthy died in 1957, his legacy lives on. The trifecta known as McCarthyism – lies, demagoguery, paranoia – has now been repackaged as Trumpism. McCarthy harnessed the American id, and his followers never awoke to his perfidies. Indeed, when Rovere wrote about the McCarthy-ites, he could easily have been referring to the MAGA-ites: “To them, McCarthy was, in anything, stronger and nobler in defeat and martyrdom that he had been before. It took a kind of beleaguered spirit to believe what he had been saying – to credit his endless talk about plots and conspiracies – but, to the beleaguered, the blows that rained upon him were proof only of the enemy’s power.”
The difference now, of course, is that Trump in defeat will have social media and doormat conservative outlets to help juice up his acolytes about “stolen” votes and other moronic fictions. It might help us heal as a nation if top-ranked Republicans would reattach their spines and renounce Trump, much the way their Senate forebears finally confronted McCarthy (half the Senate GOPers – 22 of 44 – voted for censure), but, as we know, the leaders of today’s pro-authoritarian cult refuse to assail Joe 2.0 for smearing our free and fair elections. None of them aspire to echo Army lawyer Joseph Welch, who said to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
If only Mitch McConnell and the other amoral cowards would heed the words of fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who has weathered threats while defending Joe Biden’s certified win. He said the other day: “People need to get a grip on reality. If Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really complicit in it. It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going to stand for righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you going to stand for the wild mob?”
Way back when, Joe McCarthy “gave the tree one hell of a shaking,” wrote Rovere. “It did not fall, and he did. But he offered a powerful challenge to freedom, and he showed us to be more vulnerable than many of us had guessed to a seditious demagogy.” Vulnerable indeed. How many times can that tree be shaken before it falls? As Raffensperger says, it’s time to stand up and be counted.