Trump’s Blacklist

Former president Donald Trump keeps leveling threats against “the enemy within,” telling his Republican tribe that “my enemies are your enemies.”

“I always say that we have two enemies,” Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo at a recent town hall meeting in Georgia. “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemies from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.”

Trump’s list of enemies includes Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he called a “Marxist;” President Joe Biden, a “Trojan horse” for socialism; Democratic Senate candidate Representative Adam Schiff, one of the “enemies within,” and similar vague criticisms of many journalists who work for news organizations that Trump doesn’t like, which is most of them.  

In targeting his critics — real and imagined — as enemies, Trump joins a dubious throng of zealots who have whipped up public hysteria with the idea that some of their fellow citizens are “enemies of the people.” Trump even threatens to use the military against his critics, a prospect the nation’s military generally abhors.

Many in Trump’s Republican cult dismiss his dark charges as campaign bluster. He usually airs them during his favored venue, political rallies, where reporters can’t press him on exactly what he is talking about. When he does interviews, he picks friendly news entertainers at the Fox network, where he is rarely challenged about anything.

America has dealt with this kind of thing before, though, and it’s serious and dangerous. If history is any guide — and it usually is — Trump’s fiery rhetoric can become destructive and erode faith in the institutions Americans depend upon to keep the nation healthy and safe. Americans should take him seriously.

Purveyors of the “enemy within” label march across the pages of history, leaving trails of promiscuous prosecutions, tattered reputations, and fatal imprisonments. Joseph Stalin sent those living in the old Soviet Union to Siberian gulags for being enemies of the people. Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, used similar terms for Jewish people that he sent to concentration camps and gas chambers. More recently, historian and author Heather Cox Richardson, in her Letters from an American Newsletter on Substack, did a great job demonstrating how Dorothy Thompson, a brave war correspondent, exposed Hitler’s mad ravings about an enemy within to a public that ignored her reports at its peril.

The most apt comparison to Trump, though, is America’s own Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who ran around the country in the 1950s recklessly leveling vague and unfounded charges of communist sympathies against a wide range of Americans. McCarthy’s rise and fall provide a stark object lesson for Americans pondering the potential implications of the policies Trump openly pursues.  

The McCarthy era demonstrates how unfounded allegations can evolve into a reign of terror. A card-carrying member of the same party that nominated Trump as its standard bearer, McCarthy created a web of doubt, suspicion, and persecution that snagged a wide range of Americans. McCarthy’s rampage happened not too long ago — within the living memories of many American voters.

Like former president Trump, McCarthy used public forums, such as congressional hearings, to level vague charges of communist sympathies against individual Americans. He rarely provided concrete evidence about his charges, but they often stuck because of widespread fears in the 1950s about communism at the height of the Cold War. McCarthy turned a simple question — “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” — into a career killer for the rank and file and the high and mighty alike.

For instance, McCarthy targeted John Service, a State Department working stiff who had spent much of his career in China as a political officer. McCarthy accused him of failing to prevent China from becoming a communist country. Suggesting that one individual could have stopped an entire nation from adopting a sweeping political movement backed by armed force might seem ludicrous today. Nevertheless, McCarthy’s accusation cost Service his job. He was fired because of the charges.  

McCarthy leveled the same allegations against Dean Acheson, a highly respected Secretary of State. Although Acheson was never fired, he was harshly criticized thanks to McCarthy. The junior Senator from Wisconsin spared no one, regardless of rank or reputation. He attacked General George Marshall, the architect of the Marshall Plan that pulled Europe from the wreckage of World War II, for failing to prevent the communist takeover of China.

McCarthy’s demagoguery also created a cloud of doubt that extended beyond the government into the private sector and individuals. The McCarthy era produced blacklists of journalists, artists, entertainers, and academics whose careers were disrupted or destroyed because of suspicious beliefs or activities. The Senator’s swear campaign etched a dark page into American history.

McCarthy’s relentless persecution also forced Studs Terkel, the infamous Chicago raconteur and journalist, to quit his ABC television show "Studs' Place" in 1953 and affected his ability to work in TV and radio for years. Why? Because Terkel supported Henry Wallace, who ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Studs, who passed away in 2008 at age 96, attributed the blacklisting to numerous petitions he signed opposing Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and supporting causes like rent control and pacifism. Studs Terkel revived his career years later and became a Chicago legend.

The most damaging legacy of McCarthy’s demagoguery was how it spread and infected the hearts and minds of many Americans duped by the hysteria he spawned. The case of Lieutenant Milo Radulovioch is a classic example of the breadth of McCarthy’s impact.

In 1953, the mild-mannered Radulovich, a twenty-eight-year-old Air Force Reserve weather officer in Michigan, received a notice that the Air Force brass intended to boot him out of the service and rescind his status as a commissioned officer because he was a security risk.

Stunned and frightened by the notice, Lieutenant Radulovich, a World War II veteran, never saw the actual charges against him. He later learned that the Air Force didn’t base its intended action on anything he did. The case amounted to pure guilt by association. Infected by the roiled political atmosphere of McCarthy’s anti-communism fervor, the Air Force had secretly determined that Lieutenant Radulovich’s sister and father had communist sympathies, which rendered the lieutenant an unacceptable risk. His senior officers offered him a choice: Resign his commission before they kicked him out of the service or suffer a hearing on the charges tinged with the threat of scandal. Lieutenant Radulovichj bravely chose the hearing.   

Edward R. Murrow revolutionized war reporting. (CSU Archives / Everett Collection)

Luckily, a broadcaster famed for going on the air while smoking a cigarette became aware of Lieutenant Radulovich’s case. Edward R. Murrow and his partner and producer, Fred Friendly, a broadcast news pioneer, had been looking for the “little picture” that told the big story of McCarthy’s demagoguery for a popular CBS news show in the 1950s named See It Now. “We were looking for Milo Radulovich.” Friendly later told Michael Ranville, a Michigan author, “long before we knew who Milo Radulovich was.” Ranville’s book later became part of a George Clooney movie about the case, Good Night and Good Luck, one of Murrow’s signature tag lines.

Murrow’s broadcast exposed how the Air Force based its case against the lieutenant on flimsy evidence involving unpopular but nonetheless legal activities surrounding Lt. Radulovich’s sister, who worked for the Yugoslavian embassy in Washington, and his father, whose subversive activity included reading a newspaper from his native Yugoslavia, which had become communist under Josip Broz Tito but had broken away from the Soviet Union years before.  

Murrow’s broadcast sparked nationwide coverage in newspapers. The coverage embarrassed the Pentagon into sending Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott onto Murrow’s See It Now to read a statement that said: ”I have decided that it is consistent with the interests of national security to retain Lieutenant Radulovich in the United States Air Force. He is not, in my opinion, a security risk.”

The CBS broadcast also paved the way for deeper examinations of McCarthy’s demagoguery and led to his demise. When McCarthy staged some congressional hearings into communists in the U.S. Army, he angered Joseph Welch, a lawyer for the Army, by attacking one of Welch’s young colleagues for alleged communist ties. In a riveting moment that spelled doom for McCarthy’s Senate career, Welch asked the Senator; “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last, have you no sense of decency?” 

The exchange destroyed MCarthy politically. Months later, the Senate censured him for conduct that “tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute,” effectively ending his political career. He was survived by the legacy of damage he did.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Substack, Five W’s + H here.