Alger Hiss testifying before Congress in 1948. Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.

Although the details of the case would be lost on him (don’t forget, presidential aides had to explain the historical rudiments of Pearl Harbor when Tropical Storm Donald made landfall in Hawaii), Trump’s assault on democracy and the Bill of Rights has its antecedents in the 1949 persecution of former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was sent to a federal penitentiary for forty-four months for denying under oath that he had seen Whittaker Chambers after January 1, 1937.

Hiss’s conviction, less than a month later, led to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 proclamation that he had in his hand the names of 205 Communist subversives buried deep within the State Department. The Hiss case also assured Richard Nixon’s political ascendency—Nixon was a young member of Congress when Hiss was ensnared by the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC)—and he rode Hiss’s conviction to the vice-presidency and later the presidency on the assertion that there were probably many Communists hiding under innocent American beds.

Then in 1984, after Ronald Reagan became the corporate sponsor in the White House of an angry right-wing agenda, the celluloid president conferred political sainthood upon the same Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s nemesis and accuser who leveraged histrionics, lies, prosecutorial misconduct, and FBI duplicity to attack Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. (In the 1930s Hiss had been with FDR in the Agriculture Department and later went with him to Yalta.)

Reagan wasn’t the only president to deify the creepy Chambers (when he worked at Time magazine, Chambers kept a loaded gun in his desk). In 2001, the dark circle that schemed George W. Bush into the presidency held a secret, almost voodoo-like ceremony in the White House to celebrate the centenary of Chambers’ birth, to make the point that his underground journey from Communist errand boy to conservative icon was the inspirational story of America itself.

Finally, in 2017 and then again in 2025, when Trump restored his rackets to American politics, the legacies of the Hiss case and the subsequent McCarthy era of witch-hunting were re-inshrined in the White House. The consigliere who instilled in Trump the idea of American politics as a hate-crime was the Army-McCarthy hearing chief counsel, Roy Cohn Esq., who also railroaded Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the gas........

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