GOP silence on Trump's false election claims recalls McCarthy era
(CNN)The silence of congressional Republican leaders as President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of election fraud grow wilder and more venomous increasingly resembles the party's deference to Sen. Joe McCarthy during the worst excesses of his anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s.
In McCarthy's era, most of the GOP's leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories that they knew to be implausible, even as evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted. For years, despite their private doubts about his charges and methods alike, the top GOP leadership -- particularly Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft, the Mitch McConnell of his day -- either passively abetted or actively supported McCarthy's scattershot claims of treason and Communist infiltration. A significant faction of Senate Republicans didn't join with Democrats to curb McCarthy's power until the senator immolated himself with his accusations, in highly publicized 1953 and 1954 hearings, that the Army was riddled with Communists during the presidency of fellow Republican Dwight Eisenhower.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Trump broadened his claims to suggest that the FBI and Department of Justice were part of a plot to defeat him; after weeks of excoriating Georgia's Republican secretary of state for failing to overturn the state's election results on his behalf, Trump this week extended his criticism to the state's staunchly conservative Republican governor, Brian Kemp. On Monday, Trump added a new Republican target when he fired a volley of attacks against Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey after the state certified Biden's victory there.
In another parallel to Trump, congressional Republicans were deferential not only because they considered McCarthy an ally, but also because they recognized him as a potential threat. The journalist William S. White captured their skittish ambivalence when he wrote, "In McCarthy, embarrassed Republican leaders know they have got hold of a red-hot bazooka, useful in destroying the enemy but also quite likely to blister the hands of the forces that employ it. Their private fear is that a lethal rocket may at any moment blast out through the wrong end of the pipe."
Just like congressional Republicans now with Trump, GOP legislators then found themselves following McCarthy into deeper and deeper waters of conspiracy theories. An early indication of how far McCarthy might go came in June 1951, when he delivered a 60,000-word attack on George Marshall, the brilliant Army chief of staff in World War II and later secretary of state for Truman. It was in that speech that McCarthy famously (or infamously) declared that he was unraveling "a conspiracy ... so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man."
Reeves reports in his biography that while McCarthy was still riding high in early 1954, Walter Lippmann, the most influential newspaper columnist of his time, wrote that the senator's goal was to establish himself as the GOP's "supreme boss."
Wrote Lippmann, "This is the totalitarianism of the man: his cold, calculated, sustained and ruthless effort to make himself feared. That is why he has been staging a series of demonstrations, each designed to show that he respects nobody, no office, and no institution in the land, and that everyone at whom he growls will run away."
Some Republicans may fear Trump; others may find his fraud accusations a useful tool for weakening Biden or justifying a new wave of voter suppression measures. But whatever their motivation for enabling Trump's baseless and corrosive claims, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and the vast majority of other Republican legislators are likely consigning themselves to the same withering verdict that history has applied to the party predecessors who found their own reasons not to object as Joe McCarthy tore for years at the nation's deepest values.
