The conservative media personality Ann Coulter, in her 2003 book, Treason, made the case that McCarthy had been right that the government was crawling with Communists, and that the greater problem was that Democrats “didn’t give a damn” about Soviet infiltration. Steve Bannon, the former senior adviser to Donald Trump and a MAGA-world podcaster, has been making the case for McCarthy’s rehabilitation since at least 2013 and remains fixated on the cause. When I recently raised the matter with him, he told me that “McCarthy is a hero to me” and explained that he had tried to buy the North Carolina home of McCarthy’s most famous target, General George C. Marshall. (Bannon said he ended up buying a home nearby.) More recently, the idea that “McCarthy was right” has been embraced by other influential voices around Trump—who learned some of his own hardball tactics from McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—though not, apparently, by the president himself. Some of his only searchable public utterances about the senator have been negative: In separate posts on X in 2018 and 2019, he cited a “Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt” and “modern day McCarthyism” in decrying the special-counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.