It’s impossible to view this Monday’s Supreme Court decision to grant immunity for all acts that Donald Trump performed in his official capacity—whether legal or not—through any lens but that of the 2024 election and the strong possibility of Trump regaining the Oval Office. As journalist Adam Serwer observes in The Atlantic, “With this ruling, the Trump Court is saying that Trump is entitled to immunity from prosecution for crimes he has already committed, and for the ones he intends to commit in the future.”
American citizens, however, don’t have to wait to understand the results of this court’s new edict. The people who would make up Trump’s second administration have provided the country a clear template, one drawn from a dark chapter of our history that Americans have all but forgotten.
Most Americans alive today have no memory of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy weaponized and exploited the anti-communist hysteria sweeping the nation, creating what would become among the ugliest and most shameful eras in our nation’s history.
There has been no real analogue to this repulsive blot on our history over the last seventy years. Until now, that is.
Trump is expected to staff a second administration with people vetted largely by far-right, nationalist organizations, which are already borrowing a page from the McCarthy era. The Heritage Foundation’s comprehensive manifesto—known as Project 2025—is replete with the right’s most cherished goals and fever dreams, leaving much of its planned methodology unspoken. But, as detailed at Daily Kos last Wednesday, Project 2025 has already spawned a bastard child, known as Project Sovereignty 2025, which fills in some of the missing pieces for us.
Project Sovereignty 2025’s name echoes the nationwide attack currently underway against journalists and media in Viktor Orbán’s quasi-fascist enclave of Hungary, by that state’s newly formed “Sovereignty Protection Office.” As reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, legal experts characterize that office as an organ intent on preserving Orbán’s regime by creating “a perfect setting of intimidation” through widespread surveillance and spying on journalists and private citizens.
The initial goal of those behind Project Sovereignty 2025 is to force out federal employees seen as opposing an incoming Trump administration—and to at least start this before November. This summer, they intend to publish a website containing a McCarthy-esque blacklist “to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump,” according to The Guardian. In other words, the list’s only conceivable intent is to intimidate and terrorize these individuals into leaving their jobs by exposing them to online and possibly in-person harassment.
As reported by The Guardian:
The group behind the list is the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which was founded in 2020 and describes its mission as “working non-stop to expose the left’s secrets and hold Biden accountable.” A 2022 New Yorker profile described AAF as a “conservative dark-money group” and “slime machine.”
Doxing people is a favored method of Donald Trump, who routinely engages (by himself and through his campaign) his rabid supporters by publishing the names and identifying information of his targets. As employed by Trump, this tactic deliberately gives him plausible deniability for any violence or harassment that follows, and as the hundreds of people subjected to this by Trump’s minions can attest, the harassment can be unremitting and even violent.
That a private organization could publicly tout a McCarthy-like enemies list—and do so before this year’s election—indicates how Republicans and other right-wing extremists will operate if the tools of government are handed over to them. What is now a private effort of conservative think-tanks to intimidate swaths of the federal workforce portends an overall intent of exposing other opponents of Trump’s policies. In effect, Project Sovereignty 2025 can be understood as a prototype method for attacking anyone the administration deems an enemy. The movement’s Project 2025, if imposed, would enable this virulent form of McCarthyism by enlisting a Trump-loyal Department of Justice and FBI to investigate those who oppose Trump’s policies, either actively or by simply refraining to protect them from right-wing attacks.
Already, it’s clear how congressional Republicans will behave if Trump is elected again. In December, Ohio Sen. (and Trump vice-presidential aspirant) J.D. Vance penned a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding Garland investigate an alleged conspiracy to commit insurrection by the conservative, anti-Trump columnist Robert Kagan. The impetus for Vance’s letter? An opinion piece that Kagan authored for The Washington Post that described the likelihood of a dictatorship should Trump return to office. (It did not appear to cross Vance’s mind that his demand for such an investigation was in fact the best evidence that Kagan was right.)
Earlier than this, the performative “witch hunts” that Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik and her colleagues led against several Ivy League presidents, done under the pretense of rooting out antisemitism on college campuses, is another precursor of how the government could be weaponized against Trump’s opponents. Those hearings were less grounded in genuine concern about antisemitism, and more intended for these Republicans to score political points against higher education—a goal in tandem with Project 2025.
There is virtually no limit on this movement’s list of possible targets. Planned Parenthood, GLSEN, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are all left-leaning organizations that have been attacked—sometimes physically—in the past by right-wing extremists. None of these organizations would escape targeting by a Trump administration eager to snuff out dissenting voices.
But while 1950s McCarthyism depended on stoking an anti-communist panic among the public, this new brand of intimidation promises to be more meticulous. Thanks to the internet and a vast right-wing media, Project 2025 has the unprecedented ability to pry into the lives of liberal organizations and individuals. This far exceeds the tools wielded by 1950s demagogues.
Nor did McCarthy himself have a legion of heavily armed militias waiting to do his bidding. Trump, who has promised to pardon the terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, knows he possesses an army salivating for an opportunity to carry out campaigns of intimidation. Project 2025 also has plans to enlist the military and local law enforcement in Trump’s causes, from putting down domestic protests to enforcing his plans for mass deportations. Contrast that with McCarthy, who was mostly reliant on his own demagoguery and a cowed media establishment. What McCarthy did have, however, was a complicit Justice Department spurred on by clandestine executive actions—which is exactly what Project 2025 envisions.
Just like the right-wing fanatics screened to carry out Project 2025 on Trump’s behalf, McCarthyism was preceded by loyalty oaths. Then came the accusations. And finally, the hearings and purges aided by Congress under the rubric of the House Un-American Affairs Committee, continually bolstered by McCarthy’s demagoguery in the Senate. McCarthyism ended with thousands of Americans hounded out of their careers, professionally blacklisted and privately ostracized. Many never recovered from the experience. Some committed suicide. And during the thick of it, the effect of these highly publicized trials and McCarthy’s accusations had a devastating effect as liberals—from labor activists to the entertainment industry—were intimidated into submission. Political dissent was silenced through the cultivation of fear and second-guessing that permeated the nation’s institutions.
At each step along the way, the public had a choice: cower in fear or try to stop it. The news media had that choice as well. And both largely failed to do so. Ultimately—and thankfully—McCarthy ended up self-destructing under the withering contempt of a single Boston lawyer and the spotlight of a few brave reporters.
But we live in a far different time. If Donald Trump is reelected, this new strain of McCarthyism will be more dispersed, more agile, and more selectively targeted, enabled by political demagogues and a right-wing media establishment that has proved itself capable of deluding vast numbers of Americans. It will have the tools of a now-unaccountable and vindictive executive, and it will have devout followers behind it, spawning a McCarthyism on steroids, crafted for this hyper-partisan internet age. Elected Democrats—who will certainly oppose Trump’s regime—will find themselves under attack.
Conservatives see this election as their moment to establish a persistent, ruthless hegemony over our government. Their published plans show they will stop at nothing, even if that means dragging our country back into one of the worst eras in our history. We have one opportunity to stop this from happening: by voting—and, just as important, by getting out the vote—this November. If we fail, it seems increasingly unlikely we will get another chance.
