A New Red Scare?
Broadway profiles the McCarthy era to warn against Trump's push to silence dissent
Broadway’s hottest play of the 2025 season, Good Night, and Good Luck, draws parallels between the McCarthyism of the 1950s and today’s moves by the Trump Administration to limit free speech and challenge the rule of law. “We’ve defeated demagoguery before,” says Director David Cromer. “Can we do it again?”
NEW YORK—At $800 a pop for the good seats and close to $300 each for the cheaper ones, seeing the five-time Tony Award nominated play last week—Good Night, and Good Luck, starring George Clooney—was like watching a cross between a pep rally and a community fundraiser.
Yes, seeing Clooney star in his first Broadway show is a big draw. But the play’s limited-run peek at McCarthyism is proving to be equally compelling. Set in the 1950s, the play profiles CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow’s take-down of the era’s Republican right-wing red scare crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury and even the U.S. Army.
The production has been filling every seat, every night, making tickets both too expensive and yet so popular that they’re nearly impossible to get. The parallels between the McCarthyism of the 1950s and some of Trumpworld’s current tactics—to whip up fear and suspicions of left-wing ideologies, suppress political dissent and publicly accuse individuals of subversive activities with little regard for the truth—are striking.
The script sounds as though it’s a deliberate allegory for much of what’s happening now. When Clooney, playing Murrow, inveighs against convictions of people with no evidence but sealed evidence that proves nothing, we think of American immigrants being deported to El Salvador without due process. When the Murrow team’s employees are told to sign a “loyalty oath” to quash political dissent and save their jobs, we think of the U.S. federal government’s current screening of federal workers to help Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] decide who to lay off and who to keep working.
We fought internal attacks on democracy before, Clooney’s Murrow seems to say. We can do it again. “Hope sells,” says the show’s director, David Cromer.
History Rhymes
Cromer says Murrow’s work at CBS to expose McCarthy’s mostly baseless, anti-Communist fervor, which blacklisted hundreds, was a politically-driven effort by the right to limit dissent by the country’s left-wing voters and intellectuals —and flew in the face of constitutional rights guaranteeing free speech and equal protection under the law. “In these anxious times today,” Cromer said from the stage the night I attended, “this story is a reminder of how history repeats itself.” Cromer’s remarks—a pitch for audience activism—triggered a standing ovation. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” he said. Clooney then added, directly quoting Murrow from his pioneering, ‘50s-era news show for CBS called See It Now: “The basic freedoms that we took for granted are under attack once more.”
The play —a Broadway adaptation of the hit 2005 film of the same name—has broken its own all-time record for highest grossing play in Broadway history, and is the first to surpass a gross of $4 million in a single week.
Changing the Game
Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter and the author of Red Scare, a new book which delves into the cultural, political and social factors that led to McCarthyism and its eventual decline, says the McCarthy era was a time in post-World War II America of “heightened fear and paranoia.” It reached a peak, he said, when McCarthy, for many years a relatively unknown senator from Wisconsin, catapulted into the public consciousness, delivering his infamous “Enemies From Within” speech— in which McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 known Communists infiltrating the U.S. State Department. That list was later found to be unverifiable— “a fraud and a hoax” based on hearsay and speculation, but not before McCarthy subjected the individuals named to significant reputational harm and public outcry.
“History conveys important parallels, but also differences,” Risen told us. Can pro-democracy advocates—red or blue—in today’s political climate effectively oppose Trump without being intimidated, blacklisted and harassed?
“I’m an optimist about the future,” Risen says, “because we defeated efforts by the right during the McCarthy era to weaponize the government against the left. But I’m also pessimistic about how we can defeat this effort again, because today it’s the President leading the charge, and that changes the game.”
How Trump Echoes McCarthy
Political historians, academics, commentators and experts in the rise and fall of political autocracies all say Trump is using some of the tactics McCarthy crafted to manufacture public fear, to reach prominence and to discourage dissent.
[It should also be noted that one of McCarthy’s attorneys, Roy Cohn, who was assisting McCarthy’s investigations of suspected Communists, also represented and mentored Donald Trump during Trump’s early business career in the 1970s and 1980s.]
Here are some of those tactical similarities:
McCarthy famously created “an enemies list” of left-wing activists. Trump also has such a list. The Trump administration’s recent wave of government deportations and detentions of people for “ties” to “terrorist groups” without evidence or trial, also echoes what was being discussed in the McCarthy hearings. McCarthy falsely accused government employees of colluding with the Communist party. Trump says, also without evidence, that immigrants to America “are mostly rapists, thieves and criminals.” Trump also has famously referred to his domestic political opponents as “vermin” and has said on a number of occasions that immigration is “poisoning the blood” of the U.S.
Trump, like McCarthy, is targeting journalists and online influencers who don’t report the news as he wants to see it conveyed to the public. After Murrow began covering McCarthy’s effort to round up Communists, McCarthy falsely asserted that Murrow was on the Soviet payroll for decades. [Murrow’s followup, a week later, is a classic, just-the-facts takedown.] Trump, for his part, is banning the Associated Press from attending press briefings in the White House Press Room because the news company has refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. This past Sunday, U.S. customs officials detained online influencer Hasan Piker at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to question him about his political views. Piker, a popular Turkish-American influencer and vocal Trump critic, has 6 million followers across Twitch, Instagram, TikTok and X, and is known for his pro-Gaza stance. “Holding me for questioning like that was an effort to intimidate me so I would stop expressing dissent,” Piker told the BBC after the incident.
Loyalty tests. McCarthy and his allies helped to establish and enforce Executive Order 9835, which authorized what was then called the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, to target those left-wing intellectuals and political dissidents working for the federal government deemed to be subversive. Over the past three months, Trump aides and DOGE employees have been using loyalty tests and other efforts to purge government employees, including emailing questionnaires asking employees about their political views, to help select who to fire and who to keep employed in federal agencies. Trump is also targeting Ivy League universities and state and federal judges who deliver “leftist” verdicts he opposes, and is canceling federal contracts with universities— and law firms which Trump considers to be supportive of left-wing ideologies.
McCarthy, like Trump, used lies to persuade others of dangers fabricated to target the left. The term "McCarthyism" is, today, synonymous with the use of unsubstantiated accusations and fear-mongering tactics. Trump also has used misinformation to target vulnerable groups, especially legal, non-white immigrants. The Trump-Vance charge during the 2024 presidential campaign claiming that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio were eating the dogs and other pets owned by local residents, was one of many baseless accusations supported by Trump and his team. The spread of these false claims was later linked to an increase in threats and harassment against the Haitian community in Springfield, including bomb threats targeting schools and city buildings.
Feigning ignorance of the rule of law. As a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy took an oath of office swearing he would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”—but after Murrow’s stories raised doubt about McCarthy’s methods among viewers, McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954 for his conduct, which was seen as abusive and harmful to the Senate's reputation and the reputation of those accused. Trump has twice placed his hand on a Bible and sworn, to the best of his ability to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” but when asked on Meet the Press May 4th whether he thinks immigrants to the United States are entitled to due process—the Constitutional rights enshrined in both the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments—Trump said: “I don’t know.”
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, testifying at the May 5, 1954 McCarthy-U.S. Army hearing. (Photo by the AP, with permission)
No Fear
Toward the end of Good Night, and Good Luck, the play’s audience is shown the famous archival footage of the U.S. Army’s special legal counsel Joseph Welch asking McCarthy—during the McCarthy-U.S. Army hearings in June 1954, which the Pentagon pushed to parse McCarthy’s claims—“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
By then the country was growing tired of McCarthy’s rough disregard for the U.S. Constitution. [Welch worked at Hale and Dorr, a law firm today now known as WilmerHale. Last month, WilmerHale sued the Trump Administration for its “plainly unlawful attack on the bedrock principles of our nation’s legal system.”]
In the play’s last moments, Clooney uses a floor microphone to address the audience, saying that “when McCarthy was exposed as a bully, bending the truth far beyond reason,” people began to say no to him, and “America came back to its senses.”
But in this fractured media world, Clooney added, public activism is also needed to help protect the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution, both “pillars of democracy.” Quoting Murrow, Clooney then closed the show, saying: “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
Stay tuned.
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