Trump and Musk Usher in a New McCarthy Era

March 13, 2025 , Brooke Jeffrey , Comments Off on Trump and Musk Usher in a New McCarthy Era

In the late 1940’s and 1950’s America went through one of its most shameful antidemocratic eras. Personified by Joseph McCarthy, the Republican Senator from Wisconsin who chaired the extraordinary House Committee on Un-American Activities, the McCarthy era was marked by mass hysteria and fear of the so-called “Red Menace” of communism. In the name of McCarthyism untold thousands of Americans lost their livelihood or their lives in the frantic search to identify alleged communist moles in the system, or what McCarthy memorably termed “the enemy within.”

Interestingly, McCarthy’s crusade was enabled by an Executive Order signed by President Harry Truman in 1947 to ensure the loyalty of public servants. Also noteworthy is the fact that Roy Cohn, a controversial New York lawyer and political fixer often described as the greatest influence on a young Donald Trump, had served as legal counsel to McCarthy’s committee.

McCarthy’s witch hunt subjected countless federal public servants to threats, harassment and even public humiliation when they were called to testify at hearings of his committee. Many were falsely accused of treason, and countless more lost their jobs due to unfounded accusations over unrelated issues such as sexual orientation. Some committed suicide. Over time the quasi-totalitarian actions of McCarthy and his enforcer, notorious FBI boss Herbert Hoover, expanded beyond government to the investigation and intimidation of the academic, business and motion picture communities, with equally horrendous results such as the infamous Hollywood Blacklist.

Needless to say many of the activities carried out by McCarthy and his minions were ultimately deemed to be illegal, and some even unconstitutional, but this rearview mirror judgment came too late for many of his victims. By the time McCarthy and his witch hunt were finally discredited, scholars estimated that literally tens of thousands of Americans had been affected in one way or another by the McCarthy menace.

Does any of this terminology sound familiar today? Executive Orders? Loyalty oaths? The Enemy Within?

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for our Democracy, Kash Patel, Trump’s appointee as Director of the FBI, has a new Enemies List. He specifically identifies 60 individuals as “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State” and describes them as “a cabal of unelected tyrants” and “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” In a recent interview he also told Trump toady Steve Bannon that there were many more he had not yet identified, but “We will go out and find these conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. We are coming after you.”

In the end, only the nature of the menace, or the ‘enemies’, has changed since the McCarthy era. Now the “enemy within” is environmentalists, women’s rights advocates, EDI proponents, woke Liberals, the LGBTQ community and, of course, almost all Democrats.

Most importantly, the enemies are anyone who disagrees with Donald Trump, including recalcitrant Republicans. It is no accident that Trump has used executive orders to implement so much of his agenda, despite the Republican majority in Congress, given his many confrontations with the legislature in his first term.

Nor is it any surprise that the legality and constitutionality of many of those orders are in question. But bypassing Congress with these orders also saves time, allowing Trump to implement many of his more extreme measures before any court decisions can restrain him. And, as he has demonstrated with his response to court rulings on his freezing of USAID funding, even if a court ruling does derail part of his initial plan it is still possible for him to effect most of his changes.[i]

Then there is the issue of the loyalty oaths, which began even before Trump’s election with his call to supporters at campaign rallies to swear allegiance. When told the practice was offensive and could be seen as similar to those used by Hitler and Mussolini with their followers, Trump dismissed the criticism as ridiculous and unfounded.[ii]

On taking office, Trump quickly made a point of stressing that the most important prerequisite for his cabinet nominees would be loyalty to him personally, something he felt he did not enjoy with many members of his cabinet in his first term. But while personal loyalty may not be a serious problem in the case of a Secretary of Agriculture, for example, virtually everyone except the Trump team could see the problem with appointing several of his personal lawyers to positions of importance in the Justice Department, including Attorney General Pam Bondi.[iii] Bondi, of course, went on to confirm their worst fears when she stated at her confirmation hearings that she believed the department had been “weaponized” against the president for years, something she planned to remedy.

However even this development paled in comparison with Trump’s purge of the Department of Defence and the Pentagon to ensure personal “loyalty” to the president. In addition to the appointment of Pete Hegseth – a known alcoholic and serial sexual predator[iv] – as Secretary of Defence, based primarily on his own slavish loyalty to Trump, the president then took the unprecedented step of firing the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff along with five other top generals and admirals.[v] Hegseth, meanwhile, fired most of the top lawyers in the department.

In response, five former US defence secretaries demanded congressional hearings on the firings, arguing it was done for “purely partisan reasons” and “weakens national security”.[vi] “Mr. Trump’s dismissals”, they wrote in an open letter to Congress, “raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicise the military and to remove legal constraints on the president’s power. Overtly politicising the armed forces and subjugating them to the president’s will could damage the morale and operational capacity while lowering them in the public esteem.”[vii]

Several critics noted these actions were particularly troubling since “Trump has expressed longings that military commanders – who swear an oath to the US constitution – should be loyal to him personally.” Indeed, John Kelly, retired general and former White House chief of staff during Trump’s first term, reported that “Trump repeatedly voiced a wish that generals should evince a personal loyalty comparable to what German military chiefs had shown Hitler.”[viii]

Worst of all, many former Trump appointees have expressed the fear that he may attempt to order the military to intervene in domestic issues, as he reportedly did during the Black Lives Matter protests. Only the vigorous opposition of General Mark Milley and Attorney General William Barr apparently prevented him from invoking the Insurrection Act to do so. (According to Milley, he told Trump that Abraham Lincoln had to deal with an insurrection. “What you have, Mr. President, is a protest.”[ix]) The question, then, becomes whether the military today would obey such orders.[x]

At the same time, and following through on his conviction that senior Democrats are indeed among his “enemies”, Trump defied longstanding conventions regarding the treatment of his immediate predecessors. Tulsi Gabbard, his recently confirmed National Intelligence Director, told reporters the president ordered that security clearances be revoked and access to classified information be barred for several top officials from the Biden administration as well as Biden himself. She reported that “The President’s Daily Brief is no longer being provided to former President Biden” while security clearances were withdrawn for former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan and former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, along with New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, both of whom prosecuted Trump.[xi]

At the same time several members of Trump’s team have added a new wrinkle to McCarthy’s well-known practice of demeaning public servants. Having created the (likely illegal/unconstitutional) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and having put the unelected and unconfirmed-by-the-Senate IT oligarch Elon Musk in charge, Trump has sat back and watched Musk wreak havoc on large swaths of the federal public service. Musk’s use of his own private sector acolytes to help him invade classified records and personnel documents of employees, and ordinary citizens, has only heightened concerns.[xii] Meanwhile the Musk team’s shredding of government files is only too reminiscent of the Inquisition’s burning of books in the Middle Ages.

But it was Musk’s recent email to public servants in the State Department, the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and the Veterans Affairs Department, among others, that revealed the depths of Trump’s commitment to eliminate the so-called woke ‘enemies within’ that he sees as having taken over Washington. The email, sent on a Saturday and titled “What did you do last week?”, demanded recipients compose a 5-point summary of their activities over the past week and forward a copy to Musk/DOGE by midnight on Monday. Failure to do so, he warned, would result in the loss of their job.

Interestingly, even several of Trump’s other appointees in charge of these various departments balked at that one. Kash Patel of all people wrote in reply that “The FBI, through the Office of Director, is in charge of all our review processes and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures.” [xiii] Meanwhile numerous experts immediately pointed out that union contracts and other legal impediments made Musk’s threat impossible to implement.

That reminder about reality did not, however, deter Trump’s appointees in the Department of Commerce from enthusiastically pursuing similar tactics. With Trump intent on dismantling the highly successful CHIPS program, which had received unusually strong bipartisan congressional support, senior departmental official Michael Grimes, (a Trump appointee arriving directly from banker Morgan Stanley) set out to “evaluate” the personnel involved in the program. Grimes allegedly asked each employee to justify their intellect by producing a SAT or IQ score, and in many cases requested individuals perform mathematical calculations on the spot. Subsequently the department fired more than a third of the staff employed in the program, a move which sent shock waves through the industry.[xiv]

Meanwhile the broader IT industry, as well as the telecommunications industry, has also been asked to demonstrate its loyalty to the new administration. In addition to Musk, who contributed more than $200 million to Trump’s election campaign, Americans have witnessed a steady stream of high tech moguls travelling cap in hand to either the White House or Mar a Largo to pay homage to the president. This has led to their companies following suit with Trump’s earlier use of an executive order to dismantle all EDI programs within the federal government. In the case of Facebook oligarch Mark Zuckerburg, for example, the pilgrimage resulted in the removal of all fact-checkers from his website, paving the way for a return to the wild west of social media in the name of “free speech”.[xv] A similar stampede to accommodate the new president’s vision can be found in other areas of the private sector, where major corporations are racing to outdo each other in their move to eliminate any and all EDI programs. [xvi]

Ironically, “free speech” has not been the rallying cry of the Trump administration in terms of two of its most urgent stated priorities, namely the removal of alleged illegal migrants and the pursuit of domestic terrorists. Indeed, despite questionable legal and constitutional grounds the president has authorized his ICE agents to carry out raids on declared “sanctuary cities” and in schools, hospitals and places of worship.

This cavalier disregards for legal and constitutional niceties has become more pronounced with the recent, highly publicized case of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident with a green card and a pregnant American wife. Khalil was also a prominent figure in the student protests at Columbia last year over the Biden administration’s handling of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. He was abducted without warning from his New York residence by federal immigration officials and transported to a federal detention centre in Louisiana pending imminent deportation.

Widespread and highly vocal public criticism has ensued. In response, department officials have stated that, “ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security,”[xvii] and they have argued that support for Hamas, a known terrorist group, is sufficient motive for their actions. Trump himself wrote on his social media platform that “we know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it…We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”[xviii]

But human rights experts and constitutional lawyers have disputed whether support for the Palestinian cause constitutes support for Hamas. Law professor Adam Cox of New York University, for example, has stated that if charges are based on Khalil’s statements in support of Palestinians, he is “covered by the First Amendment.” Cox and other legal scholars have also argued that to deny Khalil’s First Amendment rights would not only cast a chill on all student protests but might cause even American citizens to question whether their own First Amendment rights are protected.

In the end, as several commentators have noted, the Trump administration has merely replaced the McCarthy Red Menace of communism with the Invader Menace of illegal migrants and domestic terrorists. This point was reinforced as videos appeared showing US army helicopters delivering alleged illegal migrants to their countries of origin, while both Canada and Mexico agreed to include South American drug cartels in their list of known terrorist organizations at the insistence of the president.

Taken together, then, the Trump administration’s emphasis on loyalty and its relentless pursuit of a new set of “enemies within”, as well as its frantic rush to implement as many of its planned agenda items as quickly as possible through executive orders, can hardly be seen as anything but the emergence of a new era of McCarthyism. The question is whether the American people will recognize this democratic menace in time to prevent further, potentially irreparable damage. Most historians conclude the former era lasted more than six years. Will Trumpism take as long to be discredited?

[i] https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-foreign-aid-rubio-judge-ali-60ef55de60a36c61eb563b5982298385

[ii] https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/donald-trump-loyalty-oaths-220416

[iii] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-stocks-justice-department-personal-lawyers-loyalty-complains-fir-rcna189720

[iv] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/22/nx-s1-5270033/pete-hegseth-faces-new-allegations-of-alcohol-abuse-and-misconduct and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASjjkx3Y9T0

[v] https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/us/2025/02/22/cq-brown-fired/

[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/defence-secretaries-letter-trump-firings-military

[vii] OP cit.

[viii] Op cit. and https://www.alestiklal.net/en/article/loyalty-vs-competence-how-trump-is-pushing-the-us-military-into-the-unknown

[ix] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/25/donald-trump-general-mark-milley-crack-skulls

[x] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-12-15/trump-military-enforcement-service-oath

[xi] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/gabbard-says-trump-ordered-revoking-security-clearances-biden-era-officials-2025-03-10/

[xii] See for example https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/elon-musk-doge-concerns-1.7454170 and https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5305054/doge-elon-musk-security-data-information-privacy