Is Trump a different kind of American demagogue? Or will he rise and fall spectacularly just like Joe McCarthy.

Roy McCarthy and his counsel (and later Trump mentor) Roy Cohn. Citation: Chicago Tribune

The recent hearings over FBI agent Peter Strzok were little more than an interesting spectacle. Republicans harangued the experienced agent for his anti-Trump text messages while Democrats attempted to fight back. The day might not have resulted in anything substantive, but it seeped into the public consciousness more than almost any other House hearing in recent memory. Certain moments received airtime on the Daily Show and the Late Show. Major cable networks and newspapers devoted time to both Republican questions and Strzok’s fiery answers. He became a brief, unlikely hero to liberal writers during his moment in the spotlight. Longtime Slate writer William Saletan saw Strzok as an exceptional man who fought for the ideals of his agency and his country, in contrast to the mealy-mouthed denunciations of Trump from congressional leaders. Saletan wrote, “On a day when Trump exposed to the world his subservience to Putin, the United States needs a hero … It’ll be someone with a record of integrity and national service who confronts the menace in the White House with clarity and courage. Someone like Pete Strzok.”

This strong showing in front of congressional cameras brought to mind another famous showdown held almost 65 years ago: the 1954 hearings at which Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the Army of holding dozens of subversive communists in its ranks. An article at the Atlantic asserted that the Strzok hearing was like the earlier McCarthy hearings in reverse. According to James Traub, at this hearing “it was the witness who stood up for the traditional American value of straight shooting, not to mention the moral authority of law enforcement. It was the United States Congress that played the rogue.” While Strzok showed courage at this hearing, Traub added, he did not see why this single hearing would change the narrative of the Trump presidency, since congressional Republicans refused to bend or believe anything that Strzok said.

I don’t see the Strzok hearing as a repeat of the earlier McCarthy fiasco. The FBI is in such a different situation now, with such a different response from the executive branch, that I cannot make a cogent comparison between the two without a dozen different caveats. However, the McCarthy fiasco does shine a light on a question that has fascinated both liberals and conservatives for the past three years: what will it be like when Trump finally falls?

Joseph McCarthy occupied a place similar to Trump’s in the American political system. He had a knack for manipulating the media and overtaking political discourse. Like Trump’s understanding of reality television and racial appeals, McCarthy seized upon longstanding national trends. The country had been primed against communism ever since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. The federal House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), starring a young Richard Nixon, held demagogic hearings about communist influence several years before McCarthy achieved fame with his “enemies from within” speech in 1950. Congress and the executive branch had begun purges of communist members, and universities had started to investigate their employees’ political leanings. Alger Hiss, the postwar period’s most famous spy, had been tried and sentenced by HUAC in 1948, and the Hollywood Ten had been blacklisted a year before in 1947.

What made McCarthy’s campaign different was his ability to turn an anti-communist crusade into a national panic headed by one person. McCarthy sought to connect all of his political opponents to the communist menace. Nearly every liberal professor and politician of the 1950s had either attended a meeting of a communist group in the 1930s or was connected to someone who had communist ties. Along with his protege Roy Cohn and his enablers in the Senate, McCarthy created a narrative of communist influence that permeated into every institution of American society. He used Senate mechanisms to bring a long series of academics and celebrities in front of his committee and force them to name names, hold them in contempt of Congress, or ruin their reputation. Just as Trump knows there is always another “un-American” football player or unsavory immigrant to rally his base against, McCarthy knew he could always find another liberal on a subscription list for the Daily Worker or an attendance list from a communist front meeting. At the height of his power, McCarthy had the ability to paint liberals as communists in the press every day for the rest of his career.

Like Trump, McCarthy’s weaknesses were his desire to be above reproach, his avoidance of all possible attempts to investigate him, and his habit of using his power as a partisan weapon. And, over the course of six weeks in 1954, the power and reputation of Joseph McCarthy came crashing down.

(This is Part I of a two-part article.)