McCarthy to Cohn to Trump, and the Complicity of their Supporters
The Succession of Evil and Cowardice in American Politics
Senator Joe McCarthy & Roy Cohn (top) Donald Trump with Cohn (below)
I am finding it troubling to see how the GOP continues to bow in obeisance to the twice impeached, twice indicted, and once held liable for sexual assault former President. He has a commanding lead in the all the polls for the GOP nomination, and despite his mounting legal troubles, all but one of the aspirants for the nomination defend him, actually as if they were performing a chorus written by Trump himself.
Today, Peter Wehner wrote in the Atlantic about Trump’s complete lack of morality and his supporters who should know better, willingness to ignore their scruples and instead of condemning him, go on an all out assault against the Justice Department, and anyone who dares to criticize him.
Many of these attacks falsely impugn the integrity, honor, and patriotism of any American that speaks out, including military and law enforcement officers and officials, judges, legislators, other elected officials, and tens of thousands of civil servants who do their duties faithfully under the Constitution. These men and women are called “criminals”, the “Deep State”, “disloyal”, “hate-filled”, “Communists”, “Fascists”, “Socialists”, “liars”, and more. To Trump and and his most vehement defenders the are the enemy, and Trump and his Allies insist they must be destroyed. Trump says this well when he promises to be his supporters “retribution”, and says that only he, and he alone stands between them and desolation.
There are few examples of a man like Trump, so driven by his need for power, especially the power to destroy others in American history, or surrounded by people with the power to stop him since Senator Joseph McCarthy. Interestingly, McCarthy’s right hand man was Roy Cohn, one of the most disreputable men in American history, who became young Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor. McCarthy to Cohn to Trump, is the ultimate double-play of lawlessness and evil in American history. Their loathing of the Constitution and willingness to destroy the lives and reputations of anyone, often without evidence, other than the constitutionally protected free speech of those they maligned. This they deemed treasonable and criminal, even when it was over two decades old, and nobody in the GOP then, like now, stood up to them.
Since his nomination for President in 2016 the number of Republican critics has shrunk to a minuscule number. The few that stood against him in the two impeachment proceedings and the Congressional investigation of the January 6th, 2021 assault on the Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 election have almost all been driven from the party, despite the fact that Trump sent the mob to kill anyone, including his Vice Presence who stood in the way.
The GOP subordinated itself so much to Trump at their 2020 nominating convention that they did not even bother to publish a party platform. Instead they pledged their undying and absolute loyalty to the policies and actions of Trump. The fact that they did so knowing that he had no fidelity to the Constitution, derided Allies and sought the approval of dictators, and was willing to put their lives in danger if they do not tow the line meant nothing. Maybe some of them seek more power and privilege, maybe some hope that their alliance with Trump will carry over to support from his base, and maybe others simply want to survive by saying nothing despite knowing that their silence further empowered him.
Today I am following my writings about Trump’s enablers with another post regarding one of the most riveting monologues in film history, from the great drama, Judgement at Nuremberg. The film is unique not simply because it dealt with the trial of the Nazi Judges, but because it took direct aim at the actions of Senator Joe McCarthy, and others who spread fear and terrorized the nation in during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. That makes it doubly interesting, especially due to the direct link from McCarthy to Trump, who well before he took office was willing to play judge, jury, and executioner to people, like the “Central Park Five” who had never even gone to trial, and whose convictions were overturned because they were innocent.
McCarthy launched his shameless campaign to destroy the lives and reputations of thousands of loyal and decent Americans of all walks of life. Many lost their careers, reputations, and sometimes their lives during his years long reign of terror. One man that he savaged was General and Secretary of State George Marshall, who not only helped lead the Allies to victory in the Second World War, but helped engineer the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan to bring Western Europe out of the abyss of war and Naziism and stop the Soviet drive to conquer Western Europe.
Sadly, when McCarthy attacked Marshall, nobody in the Republican Party defended him. This included Marshall’s now sainted friend and colleague of many years, Dwight Eisenhower. When McCarthy attacked Marshall, Eisenhower was repulsed, and while he thought about condemning McCarthy, his noble intentions gave way to political reality. Aware of McCarthy's huge base of support and not willing to risk losing votes in a crucial state, Eisenhower delivered his speech minus the defense of Marshall and the condemnation of McCarthy. It was a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He abandoned his friend and mentor. He would not speak up because he feared losing McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin in the 1952 election. He won the state handily, but having won, Eisenhower refused to directly condemn McCarthy, and decided to let McCarthy’s reign of terror burn itself out, but it didn’t.
During the following year and a half McCarthy ruined more lives while enjoying the highest approval rating of any politician in the land, except Eisenhower, and Eisenhower refused to intervene, until McCarthy began to attack the Army. It was a stupendous lack of moral courage for a man who epitomized it during the Second World War and after.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
Riding high in the polls and with no opposition from his party McCarthy went after the Army, accusing its leaders of being Communists or supporting Communism. Eisenhower defended himself for not denouncing McCarthy publicly during his campaign or after he took office, claiming that to do so would only further polarize the nation and reward McCarthy with additional publicity. Eisenhower vowed to his aides: "I will not get into the gutter with this guy." However, the politics of silence did not help, and by the end of 1953, polls indicated that at least half of all Americans had a favorable impression of McCarthy and his tactics. Emboldened by such support, McCarthy set out to widen the scope of his investigations. Eisenhower refused to turn over Defense Department documents to McCarthy under the first use of executive privilege, forcing McCarthy to resort to innuendo and salacious accusations without fact.
As he did, Joseph Welch, the civilian counsel for the Army during the hearing went on the attack and destroyed McCarthy and his campaign of lies and smears. During one of McCarthy and Cohn’s relentless diatribes, Welch interrupted. His rhetorical moral assault was devastating. Welch exclaimed “Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The hearing was televised because McCarthy was using them to spread fear, and Welch’s interruption was a pivotal moment. Afterward, McCarthy’s polls crashed, the hearing were ended, Cohn resigned as McCarthy’s Counsel and Eisenhower pushed the Republicans in the Senate to censure McCarthy. McCarthy never recovered his previous prominence. McCarthy, died at the age of 48 of hepatitis. Cohn, his loyal pit pull continued an infamous career and became a mentor and advisor to Donald Trump before dying of AIDS in 1986.
That being said a significant part of the American political Right Wing still admires McCarthy just as they do Trump, and neither no GOP Senators or Representatives have put to the floor any censure of Trump.
Today I ask any defender of Trump the same question that Welch asked McCarthy and Cohn: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last have you no sense of decency?” Of course that is a rhetorical question, because anyone who would defend Trump today has surrendered all decency.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechjudgmentatnuremberg1.html
Somehow I doubt that anytime soon we will see any of Trump’s supporters, including those lives he threatened will show any remorse, or admit their complicity in his lawlessness and the violence that he has and continues to threaten to unleash. I doubt we will see any of them admitting to the depth of their complicity in Trump’s attacks on all that makes America great. I cannot see any of them playing the part of Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) in Judgement at Nuremberg:
Janning: “It is not easy to tell the truth; but if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it… whatever the pain and humiliation…
I had reached my verdict on the Feldenstein case before I ever came into the courtroom. I would have found him guilty, whatever the evidence. It was not a trial at all. It was a sacrificial ritual in which Feldenstein, the Jew, was the helpless victim.
Hans Rolfe: Your Honor, I must interrupt. The defendant is not aware of what he’s saying. He’s not aware of the implications!
Janning: I am aware. I am aware! My counsel would have you believe we were not aware of the concentration camps. Not aware. Where were we? Where were we when Hitler began shrieking his hate in Reichstag? Where were we when our neighbors were being dragged out in the middle of the night to Dachau?! Where were we when every village in Germany has a railroad terminal where cattle cars were filled with children being carried off to their extermination?! Where were we when they cried out in the night to us. Were we deaf? Dumb?! Blind?!!
Hans Rolfe: Your Honor, I must protest!
Janning: My counsel says we were not aware of the extermination of the millions. He would give you the excuse: We were only aware of the extermination of the hundreds. Does that make us any the less guilty? Maybe we didn’t know the details. But if we didn’t know, it was because we didn’t want to know.
Emil Hahn: Traitor! Traitor!
Judge Haywood: Order! Order! Order! Put that man [Hahn] back in his seat and keep him there.
Janning: I am going to tell them the truth. I am going to tell them the truth if the whole world conspires against it. I am going to tell them the truth about their Ministry of Justice. Werner Lammpe, an old man who cries into his Bible now, an old man who profited by the property expropriation of every man he sent to a concentration camp. Friedrich Hofstetter, the “good German” who knew how to take orders, who sent men before him to be sterilized like so many digits. Emil Hahn, the decayed, corrupt bigot, obsessed by the evil within himself. And Ernst Janning, worse than any of them because he knew what they were, and he went along with them.
Ernst Janning, who made his life excrement, because he walked with them.”
Truthfully, I do not see anyone in the GOP leadership at any level of government who has supported and continues to support Trump who could every say anything like that. They have watched as Trump has encouraged violence and promises to use the Presidency if he should be elected to establish his own personal dictatorship. He promises to purge the government, including the Justice Department, Federal Law Enforcement, Intelligence Agencies, and the Military of anyone suspected of personal disloyalty to him, and using the fringe Unitary Executive Theory, to take personal control of every Federal Agency. But no one in the GOP, other that the Don Quixote like Chris Christie, and Mitt Romney dares to say a word against him.
I hope that this essay, and what is written here will trouble the conscience of any Trump supporter who has not yet completely sold their soul to him and his ideas. This includes those who blindly support the policies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis whose actions as Governor far surpass the rhetoric of Trump. It is too late to go into a litany of his actions which defy the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the premise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable Rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But then, how many in Trump’s MAGA Republican Party today actually care if they have made their lives and reputations “excrement”? I cannot think of any.
Until the next time. Peace.