I'm listening carefully for the rhyming verse of Donald Trump. Until several weeks ago, I never felt the need to pay close attention to him. I knew he was the son of a real estate developer who earned and lost many properties. He liked to run for president as a way to gain free publicity, and he was a popular reality TV personality.
But as Mr. Trump's current bid continued to gain steam, my worry about the possibility of him becoming our president provoked a deep anxiety generating an occasional nightmare. How did he get into that position? I've been trying to figure that out.
It helps to know how reality TV works. You start a few cameras rolling while provoking a group of people to say and do outrageous things. Pump up the volume. Then get your best editors together and choose a narrative you'd like to create out of all that footage. That's basically what Trump did throughout the primaries. He just said and did whatever he thought would get attention, and he let the news media act like the studio editors. They came to a consensus on the narrative, and as it unfolded, he reinforced the plot points that got the most attention. So that was his method.
Trump's message skillfully echoed earlier right wing movements. Trump's slogan "America First" echoes the America First Committee, our nation's own brand of isolationists whose legacy is tainted with anti-Semitism and Nazi appeasement. His ability to drum up fear and nostalgia for an American golden age reminded me of Mussolini's rhetoric prior to Italy's attack on Abyssinia. Like Mussolini's, Trump's message is complete with xenophobia, reliance on the vocabulary of hyper-modernity, and assertions of national privilege while appealing to citizens to conflate notoriety with competence.
Still, I didn't worry too much. After all, most of us have learned to peer through the digital haze, right? Our sense of fair play is too ingrained in our national mythology, our national character, right? Then I learned that the infamous attorney Roy Cohn mentored Trump early in the mogul's career. As a resident of Wisconsin, I'm quite familiar with Cohn because of his role advising Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy during the Senator's red-baiting career. I understand what being mentored by Roy Cohn can lead to. It led McCarthy to denigrate General George C. Marshall's patriotism. Trump has blithely disrespected Senator John McCain's service, just as Cohn made sure McCarthy understood that senatorial immunity meant he could play fast and loose with facts during a Senate hearing. Equally, Trump has learned that the sheer volume and ubiquity of media drowns mistakes and untruths in a never-ending flash flood of re-tweets and five-headed hydras talking over each other on cable news.
I remembered learning about the moment when McCarthy's power began to dim. It happened during the early days of live television, the Army-McCarthy hearings held by the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations. A sweaty and slurring McCarthy, fed by Cohn, was deriding a young committee staff candidate named Fred Fisher. The Army's lawyer, Joseph Welch, attempted to halt McCarthy before a new line of character assassination began. Welch demanded McCarthy's attention. McCarthy peevishly began to assert that he could listen to Welch with one ear, and listen to Cohn's counsel with the other. Eventually, with his sense of right fueled with a patrician attorney's surety, Welch said to McCarthy, "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness." He later added, "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
It will take a similar exchange with Mr. Trump to break through the media fog and steer added attention to his core character, which I consider unfit for governmental leadership. He must be called out during a non-scripted moment, especially difficult to find since he's a master of a form that makes scripted moments appear spontaneous. And it must come from someone the American public respects. There have been plenty of opportunities, including the Megyn Kelly exchange, making fun of people with disabilities, the racist comments, and the utter lack of knowledge of current affairs. Perhaps the exchange with the Kahn family after the Democratic National Convention was a beginning. Perhaps. Until we're sure, let's look for a Welch-McCarthy type of moment. We need the right person to ask the question that answers itself: Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Mark Twain reportedly said that history never repeats itself, but it rhymes. I'm impatiently waiting for the second line of a couplet, a forward echo from the Army-McCarthy hearings," ... at long last."