“Morning Joe” frequent guest and historian Jon Meacham said on Friday’s show that Trump reminded him of a world in which Joe McCarthy had become president.
“I think it’s Joe McCarthy,” Meacham said in response to co-host Mika Brzezinski’s question about whether there was a historical parallel to Trump. “I think this is as if McCarthy had become president.”
“Wow,” Brzezinski said off camera.
Meacham then cited a 1968 book on McCarthy by his longtime protégé Roy Cohn — who also has served as an adviser to Donald Trump — and noted that he predicted the American people would tire of Trump the same way they did of McCarthy.
“People got tired of the show. People got tired of having — as FDR once said — the highest note on the scale repeated again and again,” said Meacham.
The analogy from Meacham follows the tradition of comparing Trump to any number of 20th-century boogymen. In the past, Scarborough and other guests have said Trump or his policies reminded them of Kim Jong Un, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Hitler.
Meacham’s comparison came after President Trump renewed his grievances at a rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday evening that included more attacks on the press which he has called “the enemy of the people”
“[The press] wanted me to walk up and have a boxing match,” Trump told his adoring fans. “Whatever happened to diplomacy? Let me tell you if I did go up and start screaming ― they would have said, ‘He was terrible. He was so rude. His performance was horrible.’”