McCarthy: Trump's Avatar

Note

An earlier version of this commentary appeared on The World Post.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists one of the definitions of avatar as the following: "Someone who represents a type of person, an idea or a quality." In terms of reckless mendaciousness, though not of vulgarity, Donald J. Trump, the current Republican Candidate for President, is certainly reminiscent of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy.

On June 9, 1954, at a Congressional hearing, McCarthy sought to smear as a pro-Communist Boston lawyer Fred Fisher. Joseph Welch, a senior member of the same  Boston law firm, Hale and Dorr, and a participant at the hearing, admonished the Wisconsin Senator: "Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?"

These ringing words at the Army-McCarthy hearings were the ones that sank the Wisconsin Senator for good and sent him into political perdition accompanied by creeping alcoholism.

The modern equivalent, in that it definitively ended Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency, was his bus tour comment that, because he is a star, he can treat any woman he meets as he wants, including  grabbing them "by the pussy." This heretofore non-word in serious public discourse was enough to send the Trump candidacy into oblivion. Trump had said things of dubious taste during the campaign, but this was way over the top. The remark (and others) demonstrated not only that the Republican Party had allowed to be nominated a man lacking the usual dignity expected in an American presidential candidate; but also, that American public discourse had developed a coarseness over the recent decades that is a disturbing development to those who have a sense of what American history is all about.