"Many are saying this is a day that will live in infamy," CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said last week. "That's true. They say it will be remembered as the day the presidency as the symbol of America's protection died."
Donald Trump's "decision to choose to believe Vladimir Putin over his own government on a matter of Russian attacks on our election, as simple and as shocking as it was embarrassing to hear those words--but when it happened, everything changed. It was like the free world gasped," said Cuomo. Trump "betrayed America. And after that gasp at Trump's perfidy came all the exhaled words of outrage and calls for justice."
"I see a realization in this unity. The realization is this, the truth is a side. And we were all on the right side in this moment, in a way that I haven't seen in a long time."
"And in that moment, Trump's luck ran out. He wasn't going to escape from doubling down and insulting his way out of it. He tried."
What Trump did "does resemble aiding and comforting, and the law has very harsh penalties, including disqualifying the treasonous from holding office," said Cuomo.
Did Trump after two years of outrageous actions by him and his band of scoundrels reach a tipping point last week in his performance with Putin in Helsinki? Was it a "day of infamy?" Was it analogous to the end of the demagogic U.S. senator, Joseph McCarthy, the key event also televised with millions watching.
In 1954, McCarthy--in his publicity-seeking crusade against purported Communists--"picked a fight with the U.S. Army," as the U.S. Senate Historical Office relates in its official account on what brought down McCarthy titled "Have You No Sense of Decency?" https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Have_you_no_sense_of_decency.htm
"The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career: 'Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.' When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"
"Overnight, McCarthy's immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man," relates the Senate Historical Office.
The late investigative reporter Jack Anderson commented that McCarthy "didn't know what happened"--but in front of millions he had been exposed for being the amoral, reckless bully he was.
Not too incidentally, McCarthy's top Senate aide was a man whom New York magazine wrote about in a recent article headlined "The Original Donald Trump." The piece, by Frank Bruni, detailed how Roy Cohn was "Trump's mentor." click here
Politico also published a piece, in 2016, on Trump's connection with "Roy Cohn, the lurking legal hit man for red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose reign of televised intimidation in the 1950s has become synonymous with demagoguery, fear-mongering and character assassination. In the formative years of Donald Trump's career, when he went from a rich kid working for his real estate-developing father"Cohn was one of the most powerful influences and helpful contacts in Trump's life." https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/donald-trump-roy-cohn-mentor-joseph-mccarthy-213799
"Over a 13-year-period, ending shortly before Cohn's death in 1986, Cohn brought his say-anything, win-at-all-costs style to all of Trump's most notable legal and business deals."
"Cohn engineered the combative response to the Department of Justice's suit alleging racial discrimination at the Trumps' many rental properties in Brooklyn and Queens. He brokered the gargantuan tax abatements and the mob-tied concrete work that made the Grand Hyatt hotel and Trump Tower projects. He wrote the cold-hearted prenuptial agreement before the first of his three marriages and filed the headline-generating antitrust suit against the National Football League. To all of these deals, Cohn brought his political connections, his public posturing and a simple credo: Always attack, never apologize."
And never tell the truth.
In the mid-1980s, I got a tip that Cohn, a homophobe, was ill with AIDS and staying with a relative in the Hamptons, near where I live, and where my newspaper column is circulated. I got the phone number, called and asked Cohn about his being ill with AIDS. He exploded at length on the phone, threatening to sue every newspaper that published my column. He insisted he didn't have AIDS but liver cancer, his claim to his death.
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