Washington Post

Trump admits his children “have inside information”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

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Heather Cox Richardson

July 5, 2026 (Sunday)

Going into the weekend during which Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the day on which the Second Continental Congress accepted the Declaration of Independence, President Donald J. Trump was facing a whole lot of bad news.

There was the war on Iran. On Thursday, after U.S. Central Command said regional leaders in the Middle East were committed to the “free flow of commerce” in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s military command said that any ships trying to cross the strait on unapproved routes would be met with a “forceful response.” The U.S. has been urging ships to use a route close to Oman, but Iran’s warning caused ships to turn around.

Iran was part of the story of the economy. The choking off of the roughly 20% of the world’s oil that flowed through the Strait of Hormuz until Trump launched an attack on Iran has caused inflation to spike in the U.S. On Wednesday, July 1, Trump’s new hand-picked chair of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, told the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking that “prices are too high.” With inflation over 4%, Warsh also reiterated that the Fed would continue to hold its goal of no more than 2% inflation, suggesting that the interest rate cuts Trump wants so badly are not going to happen any time soon. Currently there is talk of raising interest rates later this year.

In addition to concerns about stringency in the oil markets, Joe Hernandez of NPR reported on Friday that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz also affected transport of about one third of the world’s fertilizer transported by sea. Shortages hurt farmers around the world, including in the U.S., where farmers were hit with skyrocketing fertilizer prices during planting season. An April survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn’t afford all the fertilizer they needed for the season.

Hernandez reports that higher fertilizer prices are just one of the reasons that consumers will see higher food prices this fall.

And then there were the stories about corruption. On Tuesday, new financial disclosures showed that Trump has made an eye-popping $1.4 billion in his family’s cryptocurrency ventures since he took office. On Thursday, Trump appeared to feel the need to defend those profits, telling CNBC: “There’s nothing illegal. There’s nothing wrong with it I could know.” Julia Manchester of The Hill noted that Trump went on to say that the nature of the presidency means that his children “have inside information” about almost any business decision they make. He said: “Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information.”

There are specific legal prohibitions against using insider information for benefit in stock trades and financial transactions.

And Trump appears to have fleeced his own followers. On Saturday, Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times reported that as of the end of June, nearly a million people who bought Trump’s memecoin lost a total of $3.81 billion while Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump took transaction fees up front, so he made money no matter what happened with the coin. For his followers, though, his advice that “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” and to “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” cost them dearly as the coin slid from trading at $75.35 to trading at $1.76, a drop of 97%.

On Thursday, Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources released a report accusing Trump of cheating the American people at large by diverting donations that donors intended to make to the nonpartisan America250 program to his own Freedom 250 organization. After failing to take over America250 entirely, the report charges, Trump’s people created Freedom 250 within the National Park Foundation. By using a known and popular public charity as cover, Freedom 250 could attract donations while operating outside the transparency and accountability rules Congress required for America250.

The report suggests that Trump officials gave donors intending to donate to the bipartisan America250 routing and account numbers for Trump’s Freedom 250. They also took most of the money Congress appropriated for the America 250 project; in June a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic: “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended. This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”

But Trump officials routed that money to favored contractors, including the firm that helped to organize Trump’s rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, before attendees stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, told reporters: “I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed. But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Freedom 250 focused on promoting his 250-foot-tall triumphal arch at his Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Recurring problems with Trump’s renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool marred that celebration as the pool turned green with algae and then pieces of the pool’s new coating began to break loose. Administration officials accused vandals of causing the damage. They put fencing around the pool and had National Guard troops patrol it.

The Great American State Fair opened on June 25 after a number of musical acts backed out, saying they had been misled into thinking the event was backed by the bipartisan America 250. Once open, the fair was plagued with electrical issues, sparse exhibits, and heat. A model of the proposed triumphal arch looked cheap and quickly began to come apart. Visitors were few and far between, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that aerial images of the empty mall so enraged Trump that White House officials deleted them from official and personal social media accounts.

And on June 25, in response to a lawsuit by journalist Katie Phang, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting attorney general Todd Blanche to produce key documents from the Epstein files by July 2 or show cause why the Department of Justice is refusing. On July 2 it refused to produce the material, saying its redactions and omissions were within the scope of the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

On July 3, Fifty Plus One, which tracks Trump’s job approval rating, reported that 59.1% of Americans disapprove of his performance while only 37.5% approve.

And so, on Friday night, the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump flew to South Dakota to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore in which he claimed he and his supporters are at war against an enemy here at home: communists.

Before his trip to the state, Trump posted a video showing his own likeness on a golden sculpture of Mt. Rushmore, alongside the images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, with the voiceover saying: “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The video opens with the text “Art of the vision” spelled out over an American flag, an encapsulation—although perhaps an unintentional one—of how Trump has maintained political power by selling a false image to his followers.

Trump began his speech with a series of feel-good platitudes: “These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations, everybody…. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters…. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth.” And then he tied together MAGA’s white nationalism with the claim that Trump’s political opponents want to destroy the economy.

Trump clearly thinks there is political gain in convincing his followers that his political opponents are communists, although this is a lie made up out of whole cloth after the victory of Democratic Socialists in Democratic primaries and the popularity of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Communists call for the end of private ownership of the means of production, giving the state control of private enterprises. In today’s America, it is actually Trump, himself, who is taking government stakes in private enterprises.

Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.

In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.

Nonetheless, on Friday Trump tried to convince Americans that “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.” “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” he said. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”

He went on to say: “They don’t want good. They don’t love God and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion and they won’t have it.… They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder…. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

His false vision of the U.S. is aimed at the midterm elections. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.” He went on to demand that the Senate end the filibuster and Congress pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act. If they do, he said, “we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

On July 4, hundreds of masked white supremacists in khakis and blue shirts, carrying Confederate flags and flags with the logo of the neofascist white supremacist group Patriot Front, marched in Washington, D.C., chanting “Reclaim America.” The White House did not respond to a query from Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian about whether Trump condemns the march.

Trump continued his attacks on “communists” in a late-night speech on the National Mall after thunderstorms temporarily shut down his planned rally. “[A]ll these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance,” he told the drenched audience members, “not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country.”

Trump’s drop into an anticommunism that exaggerates even the excesses of the McCarthy era seems to indicate panic rather than confidence. Today, July 5, he began posting on social media at 1:21 AM and over the course of the day posted more than 100 times, attacking Democrats and boasting extravagantly of what he says are his own successes while demanding Congress pass the SAVE Act or lose the presidency forever.

Trump’s people appear to be trying to push Trump’s vision, but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows today, insisting that the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the work of vandals who have gashed its surface in multiple cuts that equal the 350 feet Trump claims and that there is video evidence, although the administration, which is famous for spinning everything to its own advantage, is choosing not to show it.

When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether they actually had photographs of people cutting a gash in the liner, Burgum danced away from the question after commenting, “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not…”

And so the 251st year of American democracy begins with reality reasserting itself.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“We need to become ungovernable.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

June 16, 2026

A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that even before a fighter launched a slur at former First Lady Michelle Obama, and even before the sight of the corporate branding at the event, only 16% of Americans thought it was appropriate to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight at the White House.

Today, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, who has been in trouble with Trump over stories of his drinking, said the FBI discovered and foiled a plot to attack the UFC fight. The FBI alleged in an affidavit that nineteen attackers planned to target the fight with drones laden with explosives and then to shoot at the fleeing crowd.

Jude Joffe-Block, Lisa Hagen, and Audrey Nguyen of NPR noted in 2024 that Patel often peddled in conspiracy theories and, since taking on the directorship of the FBI, has tripped himself up in the past by announcing things that he later has to walk back. That history meant that social media users greeted the announcement with skepticism.

Tonight the Justice Department announced the arrest of five people in four states. Mark Berman, Amy B. Wang, and Victoria Craw of the Washington Post reported that Matthew C. Quinn, deputy director of the Secret Service, told reporters that the Secret Service had led the investigation and that the UFC fight “was never at risk due to the great investigative work.” In what appeared to be a reference to Patel, he added: “In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”

Meanwhile, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee today issued a press release announcing they are launching an investigation into Patel’s alleged misuse of FBI funds. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the highest-ranking Democrat on the committee, says they have received information that Patel had directed more than $1 million in bonuses to agents close to himself. “These payments raise serious concerns that FBI funds are being used to reward political loyalty rather than merit and professionalism,” the Democrats wrote.

The FBI is part of the Department of Justice, and it, too, is undergoing a crisis of confidence in its work.

In Chicago, a case against six protesters for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a detention facility protest fell apart in May when the judge discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. Then the prosecutors tried to hide evidence of their misconduct by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.

As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case against the “Broadview Six,” saying: “I have read hundreds—if not thousands—of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

Today U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel Rosen announced his office was charging fifteen people with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers over their behavior during the federal immigration crackdown in Minneapolis last year that led to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Rosen alleges that the defendants are part of two “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement.”

At the press conference about the charges, prosecutors introduced a Facebook post from one of the accused that said: “We need to become ungovernable.” Journalist Aaron Rupar noted: “Oh, so they have NOTHING nothing.” It’s actually even more embarrassing than that: Trump attended the Libertarian National Convention in 2024 when its theme was “Become Ungovernable,” and stood in front of the banner bearing that slogan, so the idea that the phrase is part of a criminal conspiracy will be awkward to argue.

From Minneapolis, Matt Sepic of MPR News reported that Rosen said the people were “charged not for what they said but what they did.” But Rosen did not answer questions about whether any law enforcement officers were injured and said evidence would come out later. Sepic notes that federal prosecutors charged thirty-six people with assaulting or impeding immigration agents in December and January, but have now dropped eighteen of the cases entirely and eleven more through nonprosecution agreements. Sepic notes that Magistrate Judge David Schultz in April called one of the prosecutors’ charging documents a “false affidavit.”

At the time of the Good and Pretti killings, Open Measures, which tracks the spread of harmful social media activity, noted that right-wing social media personalities tried to redirect public outrage by claiming that community organizers using group chats on Signal were threatening the safety of federal officers. As those claims spread, right-wing media amplified old stories that those opposing ICE agents were “antifa” or part of a “radical left.” They demanded such chats be investigated. Today’s charges cited messages sent in Signal chats.

Reporter Christopher Mathias of MS NOW noted that while the Department of Justice is going after Minneapolis protesters, Greg Bovino, the commander-at-large of the Border Patrol during the Minneapolis crackdown that cost Good and Pretti their lives, has appeared on a white nationalist podcast as he teases a bid for the presidency.

Journalist Kat Abughazaleh, who is one of the Broadview Six, commented: “As the government raids “antifa groups” in Minneapolis with the SAME charges levied against myself and the rest of the Broadview Six, we need to be asking how they got this indictment. And as charges (hopefully) get dropped, we must remember the process is the punishment.”

But today’s charges have redirected at least some media energy from the details emerging about Trump’s “deal” with Iran. While the U.S. has declined to publish details of what appears to be a memorandum of understanding that participants hope will lead to a final agreement, Dov Lieber, Summer Said, Alexander Ward, and Rebecca Feng of the Wall Street Journal report that the agreement says the U.S. will waive sanctions to allow Iran immediately to sell oil and to access the banking, transportation, and insurance systems it will need to do so.

Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN report that U.S. negotiators are downplaying the significance of the language in the memorandum of understanding, claiming that language that seems to favor Iran is designed to give cover to Iranian officials back home.

But Philip Wegmann and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal report that the vagueness of the language of the agreement is not fooling Republican war hawks who stood behind Trump in his attacks on Iran. They are calling early reports about the deal “disturbing” and “utterly disastrous.”

There is other news the administration would likely prefer to cover up, as well.

Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today that even as Trump was assuring the American public that private donors would pay for his ballroom, the White House had already approved tens of millions of taxpayer money for the contractor building the addition.

With access to project summaries, the journalists were able to show that “internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.”

And Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial is having the effect experts warned of. Because of the dark paint on the floor of the pool, the sun heats the water up even faster than it did before, and the resulting algae bloom has turned the pool bright green. Today, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the pool to try to kill the algae.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

June 8, 2026

Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped yesterday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged.

Weirdly, he kept referring to the U.S. as “your” country when he was speaking to Welker, and to “your” elections. It was almost as if he was a foreign observer offering criticism of the U.S.

As Welker repeatedly pointed out that he has never produced any evidence for his assertions, he got madder and madder, calling the media—NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN—one-sided and crooked. He insisted “there’s more evidence than ever presented.” When she asked again if he had evidence, he said: “All I have to do is look.” When she continued to ask for evidence, he said: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”

Finally, he got up, pulled off his mic, and left, telling her: “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling. Have a good time.”

One of the things Trump spat at Welker was that “[a] country can never be great with a dishonest press.” With this statement directed at the legacy media, once again, Trump illustrated that he was accusing his opponents of what he, himself, is doing, a classic authoritarian technique to muddy the waters so people stop trying to figure out what is real and cease to believe anything.

Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.

Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.

But she wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”

Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”

In her interview, Welker challenged Trump over more than his election denial. He didn’t appear to like questions about the economy or his war on Iran, either.

Meeting with Trump in Wisconsin, at his team’s request, Welker asked Trump about the economy, noting that “Gas is up. Diesel is up.” Trump answered: “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over.” Welker continued: “Seventy percent of farmers say they can’t afford fertilizer.” Trump responded: “The farmers are doing very well.” He added: “All of them support me because there’s nobody been better to farmers.” He continued: “You know I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever. And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.”

As for Iran, Trump denied to Welker that he had ever promised to stay out of foreign wars, although Jane C. Timm of NBC News reminded readers that he told Pennsylvania voters in 2024: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end. I will not send our sons and daughters to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to bring our troops home, and we’re going to focus on America First.”

In the interview, Trump pushed back on the idea that he needs to settle the Iran crisis quickly despite his promises to end it fast. He compared his Iran adventure, which so far has lasted just over three months, to the Vietnam War at nineteen years, the Korean War, and World War II. Here, too, he used that odd “you,” as if he were looking at the U.S. from outside. He suggested that the loss of thirteen U.S. military personnel in Iran is light compared to the losses of those other wars.

Despite his administration’s insistence that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his war on Iran because it’s not a war, Trump repeatedly referred to it as a war.

Trump also told Welker he hopes to revive the $1.776 billion slush fund his acting attorney general Todd Blanche said was dead.

Trump increasingly looks like a loser, and as he does so, more and more people appear willing to challenge him.

They are following in the footsteps of CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has fact-checked Trump for years now. Dale reported yesterday that a statistic about Black employment Trump cited in a speech in Wisconsin on Friday was so obviously false even Trump questioned it.

“And we’ve also had huge drops in—and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump said. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come—but we’ll take it.”

Yesterday, Susan Douglas and Paul Romano, a political organizer and a Vietnam War veteran respectively, represented by the Public Integrity Project, filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Ultimate Fighting Club (UFC) cage fights at the White House on Trump’s birthday, a week from today. Fighters are expected to “conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”

“This plan is deeply corrupt,” the lawsuit alleges. It is being organized by the UFC, “whose chief executive, Dana White, is a close friend and ally of the President. The President is giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.” One executive recently called the event “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.”

The lawsuit notes that “[f]ederal law tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces” and that Trump and the administration appear to be using the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to relax those rules. But, it notes, the UFC fight is tied to Trump’s 80th birthday rather than the nation’s 250th, and is being organized not by the congressional planning body for the 250th, but by UFC.

The suit lists the many ways in which the UFC fight is a money-making venture for the company and for Trump, including the fact that he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the parent company of UFC, TKO Holding Group.

Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

The GOP’s “Four Horsemen of Calumny”- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

June 1, 2026

On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”

Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, and became a teacher and a reporter before she got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.

Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husband’s researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948 they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.

When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith’s party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.

Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.

Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

The anti–New Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and his colleagues cheered him on, while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed on to the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan. Clyde and Margaret Chase Smith had taken a stand against them.

On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.

She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”

Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

“I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”

“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration.

There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.

But she was right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American