Donald Trump Jr. visited the friendly confines of Jesse Watters’s Fox News show Saturday night to make a highly curious analogy: Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference is akin to McCarthyism.
“You see the Democratic senators — ‘This is McCarthyism.’ I’m like, ‘What?’” Trump said. “You have a guy screaming, ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ with no evidence. All this shade for 18 months, screaming about McCarthyism. I mean, the irony is ridiculous at this point.”
A very brief refresher: With little-to-zero evidence, Senator Joseph McCarthy attacked and ruined the lives of people he theorized were sympathetic to Communist Russia in the 1950s. The Mueller investigation, on the other hand, is working with a mountain of evidence that points to, at the very least, coordination between the Trump candidacy and a foreign power to tilt the 2016 election. Lest we forget, Donald Trump Jr. himself invited Russian operatives to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Besides the obvious fatuousness of his statement, Trump Jr. left out the fact that McCarthy’s right-hand man in amorality, Roy Cohn, was a vital mentor to his father. Last March, as President Trump attempted to shield himself from Mueller, he was reported to have asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” So, as Trump Jr. has it, his father wanted someone in the mold of McCarthy’s close associate to protect him from … McCarthyism. It does follow a certain twisted logic.
Further muddying the waters, Trump Jr. accused Democrats of being “left of commie.”
And then, in a prime example of saying the quiet part out loud, Trump Jr. called the Nunes memo “a little bit of sweet revenge.”
Wasn’t he supposed to be the smart(er) son?
