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In mid-September, President Donald Trump held a campaign rally in the small town of Mosinee, Wisconsin. He fumbled over the town’s name, calling for help from the crowd, a.k.a. the “good people, right here in … give me the proper pronunciation. That’s right, thank you, that’s what I said.” 

What Trump actually did say that day in Mosinee was standard stump boilerplate for the MAGA age: a free-associative invocation of cultural grievance and imagined threat, taking in everything from violent left-wing mobs to Nancy Pelosi’s hair salon to Big Ten football to Joe Biden’s C.V. as a fomenter of soulless globalist corruption. By the time he left, to the strains of the Village People’s “YMCA,” you could sense the weird compound of exhilaration, gloating, and mass fear that’s become the essence of the Trump movement.

The thing about Mosinee, though, is that it’s long served as a prime staging ground for the modern American politics of fear. Seventy years ago, the town stormed to the aid of Wisconsin’s demagogic anti-Communist senator, Joe McCarthy, in a stirring effort to make Tailgunner Joe’s reveries of rampant Communist subversion come to life, if only for a day. The town’s American Legion chapter organized a daylong mock Communist takeover of Mosinee, just three days after McCarthy’s famed Wheeling, West Virginia, oration alleging that Communists were infiltrating the highest levels of the U.S. State Department. New Republic contributor Brett Rosenberg had studied this episode in ideological LARPing for her dissertation on the Cold War’s reign of fear, and decided last year to travel to Mosinee to dig a bit further into the backstory of Mosinee’s ersatz descent into Communist terror. 

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The proceedings took place on May 1—International Workers’ Day—and showed a remarkable degree of coordination among the leaders of local politics and commerce. (They also received technical assistance from two former Communists.) The day was nothing if not action-packed: 

The “pageant” began with a “Communist Combat Team” of costumed volunteers “arresting” the mayor and chief of police at their homes and placing local clergy and business leaders in a “concentration camp.” The organizing committee issued ration cards and entry and exit passes, erecting roadblocks and questioning those who came through. Local businesses got in on the action, too; the movie theater played propaganda reels; and merchants raised their prices, served only Russian fare, or otherwise made market transactions a nuisance. A sweet shop placed a sign on its shelves: “candy for communist youth members only.”

At the end of the day, according to the official Schedule of Events, the entire town would “cast aside their subversive roles and join in the raising of the American flag.” Boy Scouts would “burn all Communist banners, etc. in a huge bonfire” before the whole crowd would join in singing “God Bless America” and “start peacefully home, thankful to God that they live in AMERICA.”

Minus a litany of Trumpified media complaints, and a weirdly inapposite gay disco anthem, it’s all too easy to see how the crusading anti-Communist enthusiasms of 1950 Mosinee morphed into the militant enactment of hard-right culture confrontations circa 2020. It’s also hard to miss the clear affinities shared by the demagogic leaders at the center of each Mosinee set piece. McCarthy “thrived on outrageous and unprovable accusations, playing a different political game than that of any other politician at the time,” Rosenberg writes. “He claimed a vast governmental conspiracy and magnified the chaos that followed.” Consider, by way of comparison, Trump’s destructive reign in the political id of the American right:

Trump has breathed paranoid life into conspiracies galore. He’s embraced QAnon, whose supporters believe that a satanic pedophiliac cult is being run in part by the most powerful members of the Democratic Party. He’s boosted the standing of white supremacists peddling the “great replacement” theory of impending white genocide. And he’s offered support to armed right-wingers who descended on cities this summer to counter anti-police protests, one of whom has been accused of killing two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, just over 200 miles from Mosinee.

Where McCarthyites drew up blacklists and paraded through small towns in Communist garb, Trump’s acolytes murdered dozens in Pittsburgh and El Paso, shot up a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., and mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats. They now threaten to become part of the formal machinery of government, elected to our nation’s legislatures.

In other words, Mosinee may not mean all that much to Donald Trump, as either a place name or a body of citizens to serve as anything more than a backdrop to a rally. But Mosinee, and the rest of the grievance-steeped American right, will remember Donald Trump a very long time—which means, in turn, that he’s likely to cast a historical shadow at least as long as Joe McCarthy’s. 

—Chris Lehmann, editor