No doubt incensed by a report by the New York Times that White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn II is cooperating in the interminable “Russia collusion” probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, President Trump took to Twitter on Sunday morning and compared the extended investigation by Mueller to tactics used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s to uncover Communists working in the U.S. government.
“Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged witch hunt!” Trump said in one tweet.
Trump continued to make the Mueller-McCarthy comparison in a couple more tweets. “The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Counsel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Counsel, he must be a John Dean type “RAT.” (Dean was President Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel during the Watergate Scandal. Dean offered evidence against Nixon.) “But I allowed him and all others to testify — I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide,” Trump added.
Trump explained that the reason he allowed McGahn to testify is that he has “demanded transparency so that this Rigged and Disgusting Witch Hunt” can end. “So many lives have been ruined over nothing,” Trump continued. “McCarthyism at its WORST! Yet Mueller & his gang of Dems refuse to look at the real crimes on the other side — Media is even worse!”
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After months of a seemingly unending “investigation” into what many are concluding is a non-existent scandal that Trump somehow “colluded” with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election (which would not even be a crime if true), one can certainly sympathize with Trump’s rising irritation.
But comparing Special Counsel Robert Mueller to the late Senator Joe McCarthy is unfair — to McCarthy.
The same liberal media that Trump is castigating as “Fake News” certainly agree with him that McCarthy was a bad guy, although many of today’s reporters may not even know much about McCarthy. The fact that he is parroting their anti-McCarthy template should give him pause. A sampling of remarks by liberal media illustrate the media’s disdain for McCarthy. Yahoo referred to McCarthy’s “infamous” hunt in the 1950s for Communists in the U.S. government. The Washington Post asserted that McCarthy accused some alleged Communist agents and Soviet spies of treason “without evidence.”
The Post wrote, “Some of Trump’s critics have suggested that the president, who last week stripped the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan and has vowed to pursue similar actions against a list of other critics, is the one who is acting like McCarthy.” (The irony of the Post’s defense of Brennan is that he actually was a supporter of Communist Party leader Gus Hall in 1976, in Hall’s presidential campaign.)
CNN reported that former NSA Director Michael Hayden rejected the comparison of Mueller to McCarthy, calling McCarthy “a demagogue.”
Perhaps Trump should reconsider his slurs against McCarthy, when those slurs line up so exactly with the liberal media’s negative view of McCarthy.
The term “McCarthyism” is now commonly used by the Right as well as the Left to tar one’s political opponent. But rather than being a person who made wild accusations “without proper regard for evidence,” Joseph McCarthy was a patriot — a man who was trying to protect his country from a totalitarian menace.
This is not the first time that Trump, ironically a man who employed McCarthy’s aide, Roy Cohn, as his lawyer for well over a decade, who has conjured up the ghost of McCarthy in one of his nocturnal tweets. He responded to his “discovery” that President Barack Obama “had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory,” by saying, “This is McCarthyism!”
We are not surprised that those on the political Left stoop to besmirching the reputation of a patriot such as McCarthy to make their progressive arguments. But, sadly, this term — McCarthyism — has been used for so long, and with so little opposition, that it is not surprising to see those on the Right side of the political spectrum appropriate the term for their own purposes.
Writing in Human Events, the late M. Stanton Evans, author of the definitive book on McCarthy Blacklisted by History, responded to the use of the term by conservatives. “How ironic, then, to have conservative spokesmen at talk radio shows, the blogosphere or Fox News robotically utter liberal falsehoods about McCarthy.”
Trump’s lawyer Roy Cohn (who died in 1986) was an investigator for McCarthy in the 1950s. Cohn condemned a 1977 TV movie, Tail-Gunner Joe, which was little more than a hatchet-job on McCarthy, contending that the movie opened and closed with a lie. It is doubtful that Cohn would have approved of Trump’s denigration of McCarthy.
“If anything,” wrote historian Larry Schweikert in A Patriot’s History of the United States, “McCarthy’s investigations underestimated the number of active Soviet agents in the country.”
There are so many lies that have been told about the late Senator McCarthy that Stanton Evans said he could not gather them all in one book. It is unfortunate that President Trump has added to the unfair view of McCarthy with his latest tweets.
1954 Photo of Senator Joe McCarthy, (left) and Roy Cohn (right): U.S. Library of Congress
