To the editor:

In the 1950s, Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy became infamous for accusing hundreds of members of the Truman administration of being Communists. After being censured by Congress for bullying witnesses on national TV, McCarthy’s immense popularity evaporated overnight. In the next three years, McCarthy drank himself to death. The American Heritage Dictionary describes McCarthyism as: 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusations regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.

A protege of McCarthy was a young lawyer named Roy Cohn. Following federal investigations during Cohn’s legal career in the 1970s and 1980s, Cohn was charged three times with professional misconduct, including witness tampering, bribery, conspiracy, extortion and perjury. In the early 1970’s, Fred Trump hired Cohn to represent Donald Trump and himself in what would be one of the first of thousands of lawsuits Donald Trump has been involved in. Roy Cohn not only represented Donald Trump as a lawyer but also became his mentor. Trump completely absorbed all the lessons of Cohn, which were attack, always double down, accuse your accusers of what you are guilty of, win at all costs and never apologize.

Connecting the dots, it’s easy to see the similarities between McCarthy spreading fear by accusing members of the Truman administration of being communists and Trump spreading fear by lying about immigrants and creating chaos by lying about FEMA’s response to the hurricanes. If it wasn’t for Trump calling Mike Johnson and telling him to scrap the bipartisan border bill that the Senate had already passed, we would now have the strictest immigration laws in history. Trump recently said that if he is elected, he will order the National Guard and the military to go after people with bad genes and his political opponents. If you can find a history book that hasn’t been banned, you will see that this is the way that Hitler got started, and we all know how that turned out.

Doug Brand

Fort Dodge