Fergus Finlay: McCarthy. Nixon. Trump. We've been here before — but this time they might win
Women at the White House on August 8, 1974 reading about US president Richard Nixon's resignation. Americans do not follow the hearings about Donald Trump as closely as their forebears did about Nixon 47 years ago. File picture
Outside the room in which he watches, his acolytes are becoming more and more anxious. People are being clubbed and beaten; shots have been heard. His own deputy, trapped in the building, is at risk of his life.
But the old man doesn’t care. He cares only about one thing — that the victory he believes is his birthright has been taken from him. It has happened only because those who should have stood by him — his deputy in particular — have betrayed him. They didn’t have the courage, he keeps muttering. And when he is told that his deputy may actually be hanged from makeshift gallows on the steps of the building, he mutters that he probably deserves it.
This is the 45th president of the United States of America. This is a man who stood in front of what he himself insisted was the biggest crowd ever to witness a presidential inauguration and swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the US. He is the democratic successor of some of the greatest Americans who ever lived, men who changed the course of world history.
He is a man who has betrayed his oath, betrayed his country, betrayed everyone who believed in him. On the day he was sworn in, he promised to end what he called “American carnage”. On the day he was declared to have lost, he unleashed what could have been irredeemable carnage.
The portrait of Donald Trump that has emerged from the hearings of the congressional committee investigating the attempted coup on January 6 is not just indelible.
It’s haunting.
For a long time before the 2020 presidential election, Trump was obsessed with the unthinkable possibility, as he saw it, of losing. He was ready from the beginning to do whatever was necessary to overturn any result he didn’t like.
January 6 wasn’t a spontaneous protest that got out of control. It was the culmination of a whole series of actions taken by Trump to set aside a democratic result. If he could have succeeded in bending the Senate to his will by violence, he was willing to do it.
Congressional hearings like the one being played out now about Trump’s treason have had a profound influence on American opinion before. I remember following the Watergate hearings, and watching hearts and minds change as more and more pennies dropped and people came to know the real Richard Nixon.
I was too young to remember the famous Army-McCarthy hearings when McCarthyism was at its height, but I’ve often watched the famous intervention by Joseph Welch, when he took Joe McCarthy apart with a few words, delivered like a rapier in the hands of a master.
Both of those earlier episodes — McCarthyism and Watergate — divided America bitterly, until the truth began slowly to emerge. America was able to come together again in the aftermath of both situations.
Television — in its infancy during McCarthyism and completely dominant in American households during Watergate — played a massive role in revealing the truth and bringing down the perpetrators.
But television is not the force it was in American life. Although the mainstream TV channels have carried most of the congressional hearings live, Fox News has ignored it entirely.
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The figures I’ve seen suggest that an average of around 13m Americans watched each of the eight hearings on television (and presumably more online), with larger audiences at the start.
However, 3.6m Americans watch Tucker Carlson on Fox (he’s a piece of work) every night of the week.
The Watergate hearings, and the Army-McCarthy hearings before them, were strongly bipartisan, and earned a place in history for some of their major participants.
Only two Republicans agreed to take part in the Trump hearings. One of them isn’t running again, and the other, Liz Cheney, will struggle to hold her seat in November.
So what you have is a set of hearings, played out in public gaze, that has uncovered devastating truth. But they have done nothing to heal divisions. If anything, America is becoming more polarised by the day.
Last weekend, Trump spoke at a rally in Florida for an organisation of “conservative young people” called Turning Point. This organisation, incidentally part sponsored by Fox News, attracted a neo-Nazi rally among other things, complete with swastika flags.
It also attracted politicians who normally seem to live in sewers — one called Matt Gaetz, for instance, entertained the “conservative young people” present with a series of vulgar, misogynistic remarks about women campaigning for abortion rights.
The star was Donald Trump, who spent two hours whinging to them about being the most persecuted man in American history.
He also told them — this man who evaded the draft because he had bunions — that he had wanted while president to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honour, the country’s highest award for bravery.
This astonishing man, devoid of shame or morality, lacking all emotional capacity except the desire to be the centre of attention, capable of any dishonesty or cruelty to secure that position, is still the leader of a cult which commands the support of a huge number of Americans, possibly enough to elect him again, and certainly enough to ensure that no one can prevent him becoming the Republican candidate.
Opposed to Trump right now is a decent man, older and perhaps more frail than Trump, proving to be ineffectual as a leader, incapable of transcending the bitterness of current American political discourse, beset by problems he didn’t cause which he seems unable to solve, without the strength to carry an alternative vision.
As things stand right this minute, there is no one to stop the cult of Trump. Even without Trump in power, the US Supreme Court that he put in place is hell-bent on rolling back generations of hard-won human rights. Outside Washington, all sorts of changes are being made in Republican-controlled states to control and limit the actual ability to vote, and to try to construct insurmountable obstacles to democratic change.
The greatest American president, Abraham Lincoln, always believed that America could never be defeated — except by itself.
“If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he once said.
Later this year, there will be mid-term elections in the US. Most forecasters predict the Democrats will lose their current majority in the lower house, fail to make any gains in the Senate, and watch helplessly as Joe Biden becomes a lame-duck president overnight.
If they don’t read the writing on the wall then, and quickly find someone who can take on the fight, the cult of Trump will win again. And democracy as we know it will begin to die.
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