On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Barack Obama‘s White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said President Trump was less like Richard Nixon as many argued, and more like Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who dramatically declared in the ’50s that Communist spies had infiltrated the United States government.
“We all use the metaphor and analogy of Nixon and Clinton,” Emanuel said. “I think we have to rejigger it. This impeachment hearing with all the witnesses is more about McCarthy. You have career people. you have their entire professional reputation being destroyed by the Republicans, and most importantly by the president of the United States.
“We use — everybody has — Nixon and Clinton impeachment hearings as the juxtaposition. You have to go back in my view. It’s not an accident with Roger Stone, Roy Cohen—this president is a not a lineage out of Richard Nixon. He is a lineage out of Joe McCarthy.”
Emanuel neglected to mention that, whatever one thinks of his tactics, McCarthy was correct about the Communist infiltration.