The Model For Trump's Media Relations Is Joseph McCarthy
THE MODEL FOR DONALD TRUMP’S MEDIA RELATIONS IS JOSEPH MCCARTHY
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. McCarthy’s hallucinatory anti-Communism was facilitated in part by a kind of swaggering masculinity that he deployed to differentiate himself from his patrician G.O.P. colleagues. He distorted his record of military service to portray himself as a fearless fighter against unambiguous evil. As with Trump’s, McCarthy’s world view was defined by a hypertensive, conspiratorial outlook. A conspiracy theory typically rests upon the extrapolation of a single shred of suggestion into a skein of unverifiable assertions—as with McCarthy’s 1950 claim that two hundred and five Communists had infiltrated the State Department. An internal government document had noted a number of employees whose background checks had revealed unspecified but troubling information, but there was no indication that these individuals were Communist moles. Trump’s Presidential campaign has been a miasma of conspiracy theories, virtually from the outset. Yet those parallels—disturbing as they may be—are surpassed by the similarities between Trump and McCarthy’s relationships with the press.
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