“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said to McCarthy. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

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It was the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s political career. His Senate colleagues condemned him that December; his name became synonymous with over-the-top political witch hunts. For example:

There’s some irony to Trump, the most unpopular president in modern history, disparaging his predecessor by invoking McCarthy’s name. As it turns out, Gallup polling from 1954 and from 2017 shows that Trump is viewed more unfavorably than McCarthy — even after McCarthy’s exchange with Welch.

It’s important to note that Trump is also viewed more favorably than McCarthy, which can, at first, seem incongruous.

The simple explanation? A lot more people have heard of Trump in 2017 than had heard of McCarthy in 1954. Therefore, a higher percentage of them have opinions about Trump than McCarthy, both positive and negative.

If you consider net favorability — the percentage viewing each positively minus those viewing him negatively — Trump and McCarthy are in about the same territory. At the moment, Trump has slightly higher net favorability, but not by much.

(The lighter-colored lines on this graph show relative net favorability. That’s the net opinion of those who offered an opinion, not overall. So if half of America has not heard of Person X and he otherwise is viewed 30 percent positively and 20 percent negatively, he has a plus-10 net favorability — but a plus-20 percent relative net favorability, since 30 is 60 percent of the 50 percent that has an opinion while 20 is 40 percent of that group. It’s … complicated, but we included it for those who were interested.)

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There’s a necessary caveat that applies here: Much of Trump’s current unpopularity is due to historically low approval from his political opponents, a function of our hyperpolarized age. There are no party breakdowns on the McCarthy numbers, but given that nearly half of Democrats viewed Dwight Eisenhower favorably at the time of the Army hearings (versus 10 percent of Democrats who approve of Trump), it’s safe to assume the partisan split on McCarthy was also less dramatic. That likely positions Trump worse in this comparison.

It’s also the case that McCarthy’s popularity wasn’t hurt immediately by the hearings. This was perhaps in part because people were not paying terribly close attention and, in part, because political media operated with slightly less immediacy in the pre-Internet era.

A few days after the “no decency” comment, Gallup asked who was winning the fight over the Army hearings. Forty-four percent had no opinion, many of whom may not have been intimately familiar with the subject. A plurality of respondents — 28 percent — felt that Army Secretary Robert Stevens was winning his fight against McCarthy and his attorney, Roy Cohn, identified by name in the Gallup poll. McCarthy and Cohn were seen as winning the debate by 21 percent of respondents.