There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956, and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism.

Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear: an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy, and Christian morality. Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.

Each time, federal employees were targeted first. President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Program screened 5 million workers for communist affiliation; 2,700 lost their jobs, 12,000 resigned. Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line; blacklists outlasted their makers. The Trump administration purged the federal agencies of his equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”. Applicants for civil service jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain how they’d advance them if hired. The federal employees’ union correctly called this request a “loyalty question”.

Then as now, law firms quailed, media companies capitulated, universities collaborated. Artists and performers – Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel – were exiled from film and television. In the 1940s and 50s, the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive organizations, which, along with communists and socialists, included groups from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America. Trump’s justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue, a chief funding source for Democratic candidates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, best known for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.

In both eras, the standard bearers were full of ideological passion. “Can there be anyone who fails to realize that ... this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communist atheistic world?” McCarthy thundered to the Senate in 1950.

Trump believes in nothing but himself. But like McCarthy and his confederates, the intellectuals behind this repression are true believers. “When the leftist – who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice – protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him,” Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller said in a speech. “We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”

McCarthy and his more powerful and enduring co-conspirator, the FBI director J Edgar Hoover, ruined countless lives and crippled progressive movements. But the scope of this administration’s ambitions; its armies of enforcers inside a gargantuan carceral state; the technological and legal tools at its disposal; and the dearth of principled government actors to obstruct it make this McCarthyism far more dangerous.

Global ambitions

While McCarthy claimed that American communists were puppets of the Soviet Union, and the CIA conspired to undermine progressive organizing in Europe, today’s attempt to enlist foreign governments in a coordinated fight against “far-left terrorism” potentially extends the administration’s repressive reach around the globe.

On 22 September 2025, Trump issued an executive order designating the non-organization “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization.” Three days later it issued National Security Presidential Memo-7 on “countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence”.

Invoking Charlie Kirk’s murder, the assassination attempts against Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and “riots in Los Angeles and Portland” – but not the January 6 insurrection or the 2019 El Paso, Texas, massacre of 23 Chicano shoppers by a young white supremacist – the memo is as much manifesto as battle plan. “This political violence,” it says, “is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies – including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them – is required.”

But if a war on the US left inside US borders were not enough, on 16 July the White House announced a “global campaign to crush radical left terrorism”. Secretary of state Marco Rubio invited representatives of more than 60 countries to a “summit”, where he named four European “far-left terrorist organizations” and offered $10m for information on their financing. He promised: “There will be more [terrorist] designations soon.” At the same time, the US implemented new visa restrictions targeting people who have allegedly “supported or incited acts of terrorism”.

Europe has expressed skepticism that leftwing terrorism is a big problem. Still, some countries are cooperating. The US requested the extradition from Spain of a wealthy American who has donated to humanitarian aid efforts in Palestine – which the administration views as support for Hamas. Spanish authorities are detaining him while they decide whether to send him home or release him.

Unlike the US criminal code on domestic terrorism, the laws on combatting foreign terrorism offer “many more tools” to pursue not just people planning or committing violent acts, but also those within “two to three degrees of separation” from the act, Mike German, a former FBI special agent, told Democracy Now. The purpose of the 16 July summit, he said, was “to reframe the discussion around domestic terrorism to imagine that it has these foreign connections that justify the use of these much more aggressive tools”.

Laws passed since 11 September 2001, make this sleight of hand easier. The 1947 National Security Act created a wall between the CIA and the FBI, between international and domestic intelligence gathering. But the USA Patriot Act, written and signed hastily after al-Qaida’s attacks on US soil, broke down that wall.

Civil libertarians have long argued – and whistleblower Edward Snowden proved in 2013 – that the collection of communications to, from or about a foreign target can sweep up tons of private information about Americans. “The most acute danger” of “uncontrolled sharing of criminal investigative information with intelligence agencies”, argued the ACLU at a 2005 Congressional hearing, “is that federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents … concerned with preventing and punishing criminal activities” will become “a domestic spy network directed at unpopular religious and political organizations”.

In fact, after September 11, that is what happened. George W Bush’s administration maligned and shut down US Muslim and Arab charities and non-profits under the suspicion that they were supporting a vaguely defined foreign terrorist enemy.

German continued, citing current investigations into progressive non-profits like the Southern Poverty Law Center: “This effort to designate left-wing groups as foreign terrorists ... using these broad terms like ‘antifa’ will allow them to go after people who are not committing violence, but who are simply engaging in the political process.”

Extreme policing

In June, the administration circulated a press release boasting of the blows it had delivered the “violent anarchist network” antifa. It cited crackdowns from coast to coast – from Spokane, Washington, where “multiple Antifa insurgents were convicted on federal conspiracy charges for their roles in a violent attack at [an] ICE facility”, to Newark, New Jersey, where “Antifa thugs violently laid siege” to an immigrant detention center, “resulting in dozens of arrests and federal charges”. For the record, the Spokane protesters blocked an ICE van. The New Jersey public defender has filed a motion to dismiss the charges against 40 protesters, which “contain nearly identical, generalized allegations and fail to identify the specific conduct attributed to each individual”.

It makes sense that an administration that criminalizes immigration and sends federal agents to detain and deport law-abiding gardeners, shopkeepers, mothers, and toddlers will use the same tactics to suppress protest against that brutality. A carceral system that locks up millions and imposes extraordinarily harsh sentences functions in concert with these enforcement tactics to intimidate would-be dissenters and punish those who openly dissent.

The charges often don’t stick. The New York Times reviewed hundreds of cases involving charges of assaulting or impeding federal immigration officers and found that most of them unraveled, due to federal agents’ “extensive misconduct”, from “attacking protesters” to “misrepresenting facts in court”.

But when they stick, the damage can be devastating. Case in point: the trial and conviction of nine participants in a 4 July 2025, action outside ICE’s Prairieland detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. Some brought guns, which is legal in Texas. Benjamin Song fired at a police officer – he said he aimed at the ground – who was injured. Others scrawled graffiti on cars and shot off fireworks.

Song was convicted of attempted murder, the other eight on charges of riot and explosives (the fireworks) and material support for terrorism; the prosecution presented a claim that their black clothing and use of Signal are antifa tactics. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who was not there, was convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents for moving a box of zines.

The prison sentences they received were extreme by any measure: 100 years for Song, 30 for Sanchez-Estrada; 50 to 70 years for the others. The justice department proudly broadcast the total: 450 years for a “terrorist attack” on an ICE facility. The woman who attempted to assassinate supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh got eight years.

By comparison, between 1941 and 1957 hundreds of communists and others were prosecuted under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to “advocate, abet, advise or teach the … desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence” – all constitutionally protected speech. Eleven leaders of the Communist Party convicted in one major trial were sentenced to three to five years.

Techno-surveillance

At the counterterrorism summit, Miller described efforts to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country”. Aided by technology and undeterred by watchdogs, they can do it.

McCarthy relied on wiretapping, spies, informants, and human bureaucrats digging through paper files to identify his targets. He managed to find thousands. But late 21st-century technology, including artificial intelligence, which enables the state to conduct surveillance on millions and collate data from government agencies at all levels, make Hoover’s witch-hunt look like a game of hide and seek.

The examples are myriad. ICE has a new $25m-a-year contract with a subsidiary of the data broker Thomson Reuters to provide “continuous monitoring” of such things as potential government fraud and the arrival of unaccompanied immigrant minors. It also does “academic risk flagging”, whatever that is.

The agriculture department has contracted with Palantir to provide an AI-empowered return-to-office tracking tool, which critics say can be used for other kinds of employee surveillance. The White House has mandated the installation of an app on federal workers’ phones that “gives all Americans direct access” to administration news alerts, social media posts, and policy announcements. A “text President Trump” option pre-populates a message praising him. What happens to the worker who wants to criticize him?

Those antiterrorist visa restrictions are determined through the ideological vetting of travelers by pulling social media content into government databases using AI-powered monitoring tools; the process continues after the person’s enters the country.

Trump’s friendly relations with tech companies that amass mountains of customer data constitutes an incalculable asset to the repressive regime.

Submissive Washington

On 2 December 1954, the Senate, led by three Republicans, censured Joe McCarthy. Its resolution described the senator’s hunt for suspected communists in the federal government as “contrary to senatorial traditions”. Quaint as that sounds, it initiated the his undoing. Throughout the 1950s, chief justice Earl Warren’s supreme court dismantled the tools of McCarthyism piece by piece, fortifying the fifth amendment against self-incrimination and reining in Congress’s power to call witnesses when testifying would “unjustifiably” abridge their right to privacy or “liberty of speech, press, religion or assembly”.

Now, cowed by their vengeful and fickle commander-in-chief, the Republican Congress has relinquished its powers – of appropriation and regulation, declaration of war or removal of a corrupt, incompetent or emotionally unstable president. While the lower federal judiciary has ruled frequently against Trump, the supreme court’s majority has upheld the president’s prerogative to reshape the federal government according to his whim. The recent ruling that allowed his no-cause dismissal of Federal Trade commissioner Rebecca Slaughter – and overturned a 91-year-old decision limiting such executive authority – reverberates throughout federal workforce, politicizing the public sector and reopening the door to the ruinous inquests of the McCarthy era.

What will be the next frontier of political repression? Will the postal inspector be deputized to open packages in search of abortion pills bound for red states? Will Trump send ICE or the national guard to intimidate voters at the polls?

A president without a moral compass and advisers whose true north is the extreme right, helming a government with unparalleled legal, technological and financial resources, can implement a regime of political repression that Joe McCarthy – or even Big Brother – could not have dreamt of.

• Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist and frequent contributor to the Guardian. Her Substack is Today in Fascism