The New Yorker Analyzes Trump’s Frightening Similarities to Joseph McCarthy

Ahead of the first one-on-one presidential debate tonight from Hofstra University, The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb published a scathing comparative takedown of the GOP nominee called “The Model for Donald Trump’s Media Relations is Joseph McCarthy.”

The piece breaks down the staggering similarities between Donald Trump in 2016 and the Wisconsin Senator who undoubtedly used tactics of fearmongering to align his own interests with the those of the press. Both men were hardly strangers to digging up the conspiratorial in pursuit of their own political self-interests, and as Cobb writes, “Trump and McCarthy share not only the kindred traits of demagogues—bombast and the manipulation of public fear in the service of their own ends—but a curiously close, almost familial resemblance.”

The anti-Communism platform that propelled McCarthy in the mid-twentieth century runs alongside the nativism that has fueled the success of the unlikely Trump candidacy. The two men share a penchant for exaggeration in order to evoke fear and distrust; McCarthy for instance famously claimed in 1950 that two hundred and five Communists has infiltrated their way into the State Department. Trump on the same hand has touted wild conspiracy theories — largely unsubstantiated by evidence — often in an effort to demonize immigrants or to disarm his political opponents through means of discrediting.

Here’s a slightly tweaked sentence from Cobb about one of the men to further illustrate the point:

[His] demagogy was essentially enabled by a symbiotic press corps that was both frustrated by [his] pervasive dishonesty and beholden to him as a source of public interest and, therefore, newspaper sales.

If you buzzed in and responded, “Who is Donald Trump, Alex?” you’d be wrong; Cobb wrote it about McCarthy’s tall tales about communism. A Kansas newspaper at the time even went as far as to print (pre-digital era, mind you) parenthetical corrections to go alongside Senator McCarthy’s most outlandish claims.

At the heart of McCarthy press coverage was the same conundrum that debate moderators and members of the mainstream media are faced with today when dealing with Donald Trump: to fact-check or not to fact-check. We already know that Fox News’s Chris Wallace does not plan on doing any sort of fact-checking when the two candidates spar in Las Vegas next month, but the debate over the role of press regarding truth and accountability has raged on regardless.

Cobb writes, “McCarthy struck back at journalists — in one instance literally, slapping and kicking Drew Pearson, a syndicated columnist — who did challenge his feverish distortions, labelling them dupes or knowing participants in Communist conspiracies.” While Trump himself hasn’t physically assaulted any members of the press, you could argue that those around him have, not to mention the general “dishonesty” that Trump has imbued the press with in the minds of his supporters. This tightrope walk of relying on the very journalists that you’re lashing out against was a key to McCarthy’s populism and a recurring theme of the real estate mogul poised, perhaps, to become our nation’s next President.

Read the full New Yorker piece from Jelani Cobb here.

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