There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956,
and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism.
Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear:
an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality.
Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.
Each time, federal employees were targeted first.
President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Programscreened 5 million workers for communist affiliation;
2,700 lost their jobs,
12,000 resigned.
Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line;
blacklists outlasted their makers.
The Trump administration purgedthe federal agencies of his equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”.
Applicants for civil service jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain how they would advance them if hired.
The federal employees’ union correctly called this request a “loyalty question”.
Then as now, law firms quailed, media companies capitulated, universities collaborated.
Artists and performers
– Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel
– were exiled from film and television. In the 1940s and 50s,
the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive organizations, which,
along with communists and socialists,
included groups from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America.
Trump’s justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue,
a chief funding source for Democratic candidates,
the Southern Poverty Law Center,
and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros,
best known for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.
In both eras, the standard bearers were full of ideological passion.
“Can there be anyone who fails to realize that ... this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communist atheistic world?”
McCarthy thundered to the Senate in 1950.
Trump believes in nothing but himself.
But like McCarthy and his confederates, the intellectuals behind this repression are true believers.
“When the leftist
– who does not believe in freedom,
who does not believe in civil rights,
who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice
– protests that we are violating his rights,
understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene
that some injustice has perpetrated against him,”
Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller said in a speech.
“We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
McCarthy and his more powerful and enduring co-conspirator,
the FBI director J Edgar Hoover,
ruined countless lives and crippled progressive movements.
But the scope of this administration’s ambitions;
its armies of enforcers inside a gargantuan carceral state;
the technological and legal tools at its disposal;
and the dearth of principled government actors to obstruct it
make this McCarthyism far more dangerous.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/31/mccarthyism-trump-surveillance-red-scare?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other