Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

For all the words written about Donald Trump, not much effort has been made to place him in historical context. There is a demagoguery tradition in America that Trump fits in. The tradition goes far beyond boldness in lying. It is about playing to popular prejudices and fears, scapegoating out-groups and making empty promises.

Some names come to mind: Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Theodore Bilbo, Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin. They reflect an ultra-right tradition drenched in white supremacy and support for authoritarianism. Antisemitism also sometimes figures in. Trump is an inheritor of a long line.

America has always had its quota of demagogues. Trump is hardly the first politician to threaten democracy, but in the last 75 years there is only one other person who rivals Trump as a national level demagogue. That person is Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.).

I had not thought the much about the parallels between Trump and McCarthy until I listened to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra. In her second season, she does a deep dive into McCarthyism and shows aspects of McCarthy that have been obscured.

McCarthy has mostly been known for falsely ranting about communist infiltration of the federal government. He famously claimed to have a list of 205 communists who worked in the U.S. State Department, but he never produced a single name. He paraded hundreds of innocent people before a Senate subcommittee, trampling their constitutional rights and often ruining their livelihoods.

Maddow shows McCarthy’s connection to a group of Republican senators and representatives who believed America had been on the wrong side in World War II. The group transitioned from being supporters of the America First movement to being Nazi supporters. They participated in a conspiracy to push Nazi propaganda through Congress and distribute it to the American people. They also actually opposed the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

McCarthy called the Nuremberg trials a “sorry spectacle.” As a new senator, McCarthy took up the cause of the Nazi defendants in the Malmedy massacre case. Little remembered now, in December 1944 American soldiers were ambushed by Waffen-SS troops in Malmedy, Belgium. After being captured and taken as POWs, a group of 120 Americans were machine-gunned and slaughtered. A few POWs played dead and escaped to tell the story. After the war, the Nazis were put on trial, convicted and sentenced.

In an effort to reverse the convictions, the Nazi defendants and their lawyers manufactured a false story that they had been tortured and horribly mistreated by Jewish investigators and interrogators employed by the American military. McCarthy took up the cause of the Malmedy defendants. He and North Dakota Sen. William Langer forced a Senate investigation of the baseless allegation of Jewish torture of the Nazis.

There were a number of investigations of Malmedy and multiple sentences of the defendants were reduced even though their argument was a farce. Originally the war crime tribunal at Dachau sentenced 43 Nazis to death for their role in Malmedy, but none of the death sentences were ever carried out.

McCarthy used the investigation as a launch pad toward national name recognition. His behavior mirrored the same hysterical bullying for which he would later become famous. He echoed Nazi propaganda, arguing Jewish mistreatment of the Malmedy defendants was worse than what the Nazis did.

Both McCarthy and Trump have shared an obsession with being a center of attention. They were both schooled by disbarred lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn, who advised them about how to dominate the news cycle. Cohn always advised punching back hard. He was a merciless bomb-thrower. McCarthy hired Cohn as his chief counsel for his Senate subcommittee; Trump retained Cohn when the government sued him and his father for race discrimination in housing rentals.

While both McCarthy and Trump cozied up to the far right, neither was ever a true believer. Neither ever had explicit fascist principles. Both allied with the far right, but it is impossible to see them as ideologues. They were both about advancing themselves. Trump’s recent maneuvering on abortion is a perfect example. He would sell out any side if he thought it would politically help him.

Both McCarthy and Trump have been masters of the Big Lie. With McCarthy, it was seeing communists under every bed. With Trump, it has been his election fraud nonsense. Both have been opportunists. Neither actually believed their narrative as much as they pretended to. They spun conspiracies and ceaselessly attacked their critics, always acting aggrieved.

To its everlasting discredit, the Republican Party enabled both of them, never morally critiquing them, opposing them or even trying to rein them in.

I think Trump learned from the Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn playbook. And he has proven to be far more dangerous as a demagogue as Trump again stands at the threshold of power. No one knows how extreme Trump would be in a second term, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

In considering why America has not made more progress in moving toward multiracial democracy, I would cite our tradition of demagogues like Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. They advance selfishness, hate and a retrograde vision of an America that has never existed. Both McCarthy and Trump are devoid of any moral compass. They specialize in manipulating fear and promoting ruthless self-aggrandizement.

McCarthy died of alcoholism at 48, being in the limelight for a short period of five years. Trump is now 78. His tenure in the limelight has been longer-lasting. The voters must now determine whether they have had enough of the Trump show. The demagoguery of both these men is a lasting stain on our nation’s history.