Donald Trump Vs. Joseph McCarthy on hate and retribution

Margaret Chase Smith-Joe McCarthy

Same game, fear, just different players. It was Joseph McCarthy in 1950, with communists. It is Donald Trump in 2026, with threats of hate and retribution. The picture you see here is a cocky Sen. McCarthy observing the confident walk of Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith into the Senate chamber...

'Margaret, you look very serious,' McCarthy said with half-amused condescension. 'Are you going to make a speech?'

'Yes,' she answered evenly, meeting his eyes without flinching. 'And you will not like it.'

This was June 1, 1950. And as they say, the rest is history. But there is, of course, more. As the story goes...

"Four months earlier, Joseph McCarthy had stunned the nation by claiming he possessed a list of communists secretly working inside the U.S. State Department. The number kept changing—205, then 81, then 57. The inconsistency didn't matter. Accuracy was irrelevant. What mattered was fear, and fear was spreading like wildfire across America."

Sound familiar? Inconsistency, inaccurate, fear spreading throughout the country. Margaret Chase Smith was there to tell the Senate and the American people that Joseph McCarthy was a fraud, a con artist who had completely misguided the U.S. population with his scare tactics on communism. Fast forward to 2026, when Donald Trump holds a similar U.S. population in a different kind of fear that promises horrific reprisals to anyone who doubts or denies the will of his administration.

This is what had happened [compliments Facebook] to prompt Margaret Chase Smith to enter the Senate chamber and give her speech attacking Joe McCarthy, but without mentioning his name...

Teachers had been fired without evidence. Writers were blacklisted based on 

rumors. Civil servants lost their careers because of anonymous accusations. In McCarthy's America, accusation alone was enough. Guilt no longer required proof. Due process had become a luxury the nation could no longer afford—or so everyone believed."

Chase was a freshman Republican from Maine, elected just two years earlier and she was the only woman in the Senate. The Senator gave Joseph McCarthy the benefit of the doubt, in advance, by asking for proof of what he claimed. Nothing. Even in a private conversation between the two, McCarthy produced nothing. In many of Donald Trump's thousands of lies, he has been asked repeatedly for evidence of his accusations and affirmations but he has none and depends on the American public taking his word. Most of his minions do.

Here's more..."she watched her colleagues—powerful, experienced senators—freeze in terror." They were scared beyond belief that Joe McCarthy would make one of them his next target and ruin their career. Her description, 'mental paralysis and muteness,' with some speaking privately but never in public. This is the most accurate description of the Republican Congress under Donald Trump that I have seen. And you have to understand that Margaret Chase Smith had no protections as a junior Senator. Completely vulnerable.

Roy Cohn - Joseph McCarthy

There is a common denominator between Donald Trump and Joseph McCarthy: Roy Cohn. Cohn was McCarthy's chief legal advisor. Roy Cohn served as Donald Trump’s ruthless legal mentor, political fixer, and close adviser from 1973 until Cohn’s death in 1986. There were three things that Cohn taught Trump that are still prevalent today: 1) Never back down; 2) Use the media; 3) Demand loyalty

Let's take a moment here to stop and see if there is anyone in Congress today that would stand up to Donald Trump in the way Chase Smith did McCarthy. She was a Republican confronting another Republican before the 81st Congress comfortably controlled in both houses by Democrats. Today, it's the opposite but the GOP control is razor thin, and in all likelihood will flip in the upcoming November election. So let's go forward with that assumption  with the same question of who could confront Trump?

Margaret Chase Smith's speech was titled a 'Declaration of Conscience,' didn't mention McCarthy by name, but considering, in today's case, everyone would know we are talking about Trump. Here's the scenario...

"She simply stated fundamental American principles and exposed, with surgical precision, what fear was doing to the country.

Fear has gripped the United States, especially since Donald Trump's second term in office, with bogus arrests and innocent deaths, primarily orchestrated by top aide, Stephen Miller. Could the person to expose Trump be an insider, someone working close to the Oval Office lunatic, who has the facts, which Margaret Chase Smith didn't have? Or is it more likely to be someone from the past who has been viciously denigrated by the White House maniac and is looking for retribution of their own?

There are, of course, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who could make the

move but Republicans are too coward to stand up to Trump, and no one is listening to the Democrats. So, how do we pull the plug on Donald Trump? Everyone in this country, actually the whole world, knows Trump is a fraud and a lowlife. We don't need another Margaret Chase Smith to make a speech about a moron who was elected by morons. It all comes down to November's election.

There has never been an election in American history to equal the importance of Tuesday, November 3, 2026. GET OUT THE VOTE! Joe McCarthy was chasing communists. Donald Trump is chasing dictators. We got rid of McCarthy. You know who is next.

 

Trump's mentor Roy Cohn was 'evil"

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 20, 2019 NEWS BYTES

Donald Trump's mentor dark man Roy Cohn  

Donald Trump-Roy Cohn

Donald Trump went so far during the Robert Mueller investigation by demanding that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions act more like [Roy] Cohn in assertively defending him. When you scrape the bottom of the barrel, you come up with loathsome individuals like Cohn. So why the admiration? "For decades he got away with remorselessly breaking the law." A key word here is "remorselessly," something that is emphasized in T-rump's playbook.

Politico senior staff writer Michael Kruse has written up a review of the documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” Here's the scenario...

“What Cohn could, and did, get away with was the very engine of his existence,” Kruse writes. “Cohn was indicted four times from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s—for stock-swindling and obstructing justice and perjury and bribery and conspiracy and extortion and blackmail and filing false reports. And three times he was acquitted — the fourth ended in a mistrial — giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability.”

 It's like the Oval Office lunatic looking in a mirror. You might remember Roy Cohn as Joe McCarthy's go-to man in the 1950s anti-communist conspiracy investigation. Lives were ruined and McCarthy was eventually disgraced and sent home to mow the lawn. Roy Cohn was there for McCarthy, and as Vanity Fair reports Donald Trump...

"With the ruthless attorney as a guide, Trump propelled himself into the city’s power circles and learned many of the tactics that would inexplicably lead him to the White House years later."

Roy Cohn was evil...

There are close similarities between Donald Trump and Joe McCarthy in the strategy tactics of intimidation. Beat down the opponent until they almost think you are right then close the deal. Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner reports...

"Donald calls me 15 to 20 times a day,” Roy Cohn told me on the day we met. “He is always asking, ‘What is the status of this . . . and that?’”

Brenner had been assigned to write a story on the up-and-comer Donald Trump and decided that Roy Cohn was the man to talk to. At the time Trump was married to Ivana so Brenner also approached her for input to her story. She said...

"The tabloids couldn’t get enough of the Trumps’ theatrics. And as Donald Trump’s Hyatt [Trump's NY Grand Hyatt Hotel] rose, so too did the hidden hand of his attorney Roy Cohn, always there to help with the shady tax abatements, the zoning variances, the sweetheart deals, and the threats to those who might stand in the project’s way."

Donald Trump Roy Cohn association...

Brenner quotes attorney Victor A. Kovner who had known Cohn for years, “You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil.” Are we beginning to draw distinct parallels between the mentor and Donald Trump? And if that's not enough, here's another example of Donald Trump's treatment of women...

"In 1991, Donald Trump poured a glass of wine down her [Marie Brenner] back during a dinner gala, after she’d written an unflattering piece about him and his then-wife Ivana."

Not clear if he learned this from Roy Cohn, but wherever T-rump picked it up, he has certainly refined and developed it over the years. It is beyond me how any woman could vote for Donald Trump but there are those out there in double-digit land that are, well, pathetic. Politico's Michael Kruse says, “Cohn did not, in the end, elude the consequences of his actions. He could not, it turned out, get away with everything forever.”

Roy Cohn died of Aids in 1986. Donald Trump's finale has yet to be decided.

Have we been conditioned to accept T-rump's stupidity?

Without even having read Radley Balko's opinion in the Washington Post, I have hinted at the fact in my blog posts that the American public has become accustomed to the rantings of a psychopathic liar that has somehow taken over the White House. Here's what Balko had to say...

"...Tuesday night’s fit of demagoguery masquerading as a presidential address is a frightening demonstration of how his first month in office has left those of who are supposed to hold him accountable timid and shell-shocked."

Demagoguery, let's examine it historically along with the prevailing example. Salon was profiling Donald Trump as a modern-day demagogue back in June of 2016, five months before the election that made history and put America on a track to a sure eventual collapse. In an elaborate use of adjectives and adverbs, the website talked of the "virus infecting our politics," which had its contemporary kickoff during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era. There are other bad actors and the whole conglomeration worked tediously together to give us what's known today as President Donald Trump.

Here's how Salon describes it...

"There have been stretches of history when this virus lay dormant. Sometimes it would flare up here and there, then fade away after a brief but fierce burst of fever. At other moments, it has spread with the speed of a firestorm, a pandemic consuming everything in its path, sucking away the oxygen of democracy and freedom."

 There were others early-on who developed a formula and format for those to use in later years. Men like ...

“'Pitchfork Ben' Tillman, the South Carolina governor and senator who led vigilante terror attacks with a gang called the Red Shirts and praised the efficiency of lynch mobs."

"Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, a member of the Ku Klux Klan who vilified ethnic minorities and deplored the 'mongrelization' of the white race."

"Louisiana’s corrupt and dictatorial Huey Long, who promised to make 'Every Man a King.'"

"George Wallace, the governor of Alabama and four-time presidential candidate who vowed, 'Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.'"

The demagogue that stands out in U.S. history is Joseph McCarthy, US senator from Wisconsin, that Salon describes, "...until now perhaps our most destructive demagogue." Until now. McCarthyism was another psychopathic lunatic's way of drawing attention to himself by terrorizing the country into believing there was a Communist under every rock. There weren't, and several lives were ruined in the process. I had a close friend in Los Angeles who was a movie screenwriter who knew a few fellow writers whose lives were affected. And tailgunner Joe didn't even have a bully pulpit.

Remember Roy Cohn, he was chief counsel to McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee and wouldn't you know it, the bad seed is back. As Salon put it, "Cohn was McCarthy’s henchman, a master of dark deeds and dirty tricks. "Cohn didn't go down with McCarthy when Edward R. Murrow exposed him on his CBS show, "See it Now." But not Cohn, who continued his operations in New York where he ended up working for mob bosses and, yes, Donald Trump's father, Fred, until later years when he made his McCarthy-like methods of strong-arm manipulation available to Donald.

Bernie Sanders on what Donald Trump did not say in his speech to Congress:

Cohn also introduced Trump to the man who was his campaign chair, Paul Manafort, someone who made a fortune representing dictators. Salon has an interesting analogy between Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump...

"So the ghost of Joseph McCarthy lives on in Donald Trump as he accuses President Obama of treason, slanders women, mocks people with disabilities and impugns every politician or journalist who dares call him out for the liar and bamboozler he is. The ghosts of all the past American demagogues live on in him as well, although none of them have ever been so dangerous."

Returning to the present and Balko's charge that Donald John has conditioned us to just accept him the way he is and go on with our business, letting him run the country in the ground. Balko says, "We need to be better than that." And we should. The writer comments...

"We’ve been conditioned to accept behavior from the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth that we’d never have accepted from his predecessors (and I have pretty low expectations of presidents) — that we’d never accept from a friend, relative, pastor or community leader — as long as he spares us and our group from his attacks."

Trump's speech to Congress included the same lies that we have heard over and over, except that this time he delivered them in a toned-down rhetoric that is as much like the normal Trump as Scotch is like bourbon. Where it came from I do not know, but I suspect it is another of his underhanded tactics to appease a few concerned Republicans along the way who get their skivvies in a dither when he's too much the bad boy. Balko is really up in arms over the bi-partisan praise when this wasn't the man talking who has been ranting and raving such absurdities for his first month in office.

Balko disparages Trump's speech grammar, saying it was "terribly written," and "full of his typical doom-and-gloom pronouncements about America," quoting one of his most egregious passages...

"Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms."

Just hours before the speech Donald John had indicated that some of the attacks, above, had been perpetrated by Jews themselves. More extreme exaggeration almost to the point of lying...

"We’ve defended the borders of other nations, while leaving our own borders wide open, for anyone to cross — and for drugs to pour in at a now unprecedented rate."

At best, this statement is borderline bogus. More on drugs...

"I have further ordered the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, along with the Department of State and the Director of National Intelligence, to coordinate an aggressive strategy to dismantle the criminal cartels that have spread across our nation."

Balko documents that when George W. Bush attempted the same thing, by coercing the Mexican

Mexican drug casualties

government into militarizing its drug war, the country’s homicide rate jumped by nearly 250 percent. Regarding Trump's "banned" list...

"It is not compassionate, but reckless, to allow uncontrolled entry from places where proper vetting cannot occur. Those given the high honor of admission to the United States should support this country and love its people and its values. We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America — we cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists."

Now here's a refuting fact, "The odds of your average American being killed by a terrorist attack committed by a refugee are astronomical, about one in 3.6 billion."

There is more and Radley Balko's opinion is chock full of solid facts and a good reasoning where the United States stands after only a month of the reign of Donald Trump you can read here. It's up to us where we go from there.