Trump Republican support recalls GOP support for McCarthy seventy years ago.

On February 9, 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, a totally unfit public servant, struck gold with a speech before West Virginia Republicans. He charged that 205 commies were infesting the State Department. His fellow Republicans knew he was once again playing the fool, lying viciously to get attention and further his floundering career. But McCarthy had struck gold with the press and the public, vaulting him atop the GOP effort to retake the White House and Congress. Famed political cartoonist Herblock pictured Joe straddling vats of tar, coining the phrase ‘McCarthyism’ to describe the slash and burn political tactics forever associated with McCarthy.

But rather than call out McCarthy’s lies and shun him, GOP leaders gave him free rein to serve as hatchet man in the 1952 election, the dozens, hundreds ruined by his conduct be damned. McCarthy proudly held up a 1952 example of photo shopping to falsely tie Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson to convicted communist perjurer Alger Hiss. McCarthy renamed the liberal wing of the Democratic Party ‘Commiecrats’. It took two more years for McCarthy to so disgrace himself during the Army-McCarthy Hearings that the Senate, in a rare show of bipartisan leadership, censured him.

Seventy years on Republicans are also backing a compulsively lying con man to retain the White House. But unlike just another senator, this Republican support is for a charlatan becoming president. In 2016 they all knew his utter incompetency to govern on many levels. But they choked back their solemn duty, keeping their eye on the prize. And despite his utter failure to confront the twin existential problems of pandemic and racial divide, virtually every Republican leader maintains that support. Only former president George W. Bush and Senator Mitt Romney have bailed on voting for Trump this November, tho others are now straddling the fence. On December 2, 1954, 22 Republicans, half the GOP senators present, voted to censure Joe McCarthy. If anywhere near that percentage of today’s GOP leaders would publicly reject Trump, his re-election chances, possibly even his candidacy, would collapse.

This is one time we need history to repeat itself.