McCarthy began his career calling himself a supporter of the New Deal, but he was really more of a political opportunist. His first opportunity to run for statewide office required the support of Wisconsin’s conservative, anti–New Deal Republicans, and McCarthy quickly molded himself to his new constituency. McCarthy was hardly the first Republican to smear his opponent as a communist. What made him so terrifyingly successful was his political style.
McCarthy was a serial liar, often frustrating his staffers by departing from whatever text they had prepared for him. “If we give this to the senator … he will blow it up to proportions which cannot be supported,” fretted one staffer. And while erratic and uncontrollable, McCarthy managed to commandeer hyperbolic press coverage, simply because the very fact of his sinister accusations was objectively newsworthy and attracted attention from readers. Reporters were well aware that McCarthy was manipulating them, and they brooded over his ability to turn their principles of journalistic objectivity against them. One paper experimented with banning all McCarthy stories from the front page. Much like the Huffington Post’s short******d policy of exiling Trump coverage to the entertainment section, it did not take.
When the press subjected McCarthy’s lies to scrutiny, he would lash out viciously, often likening the papers in question to the Daily Worker, the communist party organ. These assaults were calculated to train his supporters to distrust any claim not made by McCarthy himself. In private, McCarthy often cozied up to the reporters he savaged in public. “If you show a newspaper as unfriendly and having a reason for being antagonistic, you can take a lot of the sting out of what it says about you,” he confessed privately to a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal, “I think you can convince a lot of people that they can’t believe what they read in the Journal.”
McCarthy’s commitment to bury any critic with counteraccusations intimidated many of his critics into silence. “I don’t answer charges; I make them,” he liked to say, and his counterpunching could force anybody who stood up to him to defend whatever weak point McCarthy could locate.
Many of the stylistic similarities between McCarthy and Donald Trump can be attributed to their shared link with Roy Cohn, who served as the closest adviser to both men in their formative years. But what is perhaps more illuminating than their shared methods is the eerily familiar response McCarthy provoked across the political spectrum.
McCarthy’s crude populism repelled educated voters in both parties, making him the subject of private disdain and ridicule among elites in both parties. But it gave him an allure to the (white) working class voters, some of them Democrats, that fellow Republicans could not match. The core of his support was widely seen as impervious to reason or any amount of proof that he was lying. “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children,” pollster George Gallup remarked privately, “they would probably still go along with him,” anticipating Trump’s famous “5th Avenue” boast.
McCarthy also benefited from a backlash that observers of the Trump era will recognize instantly. McCarthy’s demagoguery terrified his opponents, many of whom targeted him with smears of their own. Liberals incessantly compared him with Adolf Hitler. Many conservatives who blanched at McCarthy’s tactics nonetheless found themselves more agitated by the excesses of his critics. “They charged that the righteous people who condemned his name-calling were the same people who called him a Nazi, a jackal and a thug …” recounts David Oshinsky in his 1983 biography, “A Conspiracy So Immense” (from which many of the details in this article are taken), “the people who yelled loudest at his ‘dirty’ tactics were the same people who spread rumors about his alleged homosexuality and hired spies to infiltrate his office.” Anti-anti-McCarthyism became a powerful glue for the right.