Whenever liberals say that Donald Trump is acting like a budding dictator, his supporters frequently dismiss it as hyperbole. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so when Trump himself throws around phrases that were frequently used by history’s most infamous tyrants.
Take the phrase “enemy of the people,” for instance. Trump has adopted it as his standard line in his war on the media–a war he ramped up to new levels when he rage-tweeted that the mainstream media was “the enemy of the American people.” He repeated it during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when he ranted that the media is “the enemy of the people” because it relies a lot on stories without sources.
When Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York City, heard how often Trump threw this phrase around, it sent a chill down her spine–and for more reasons that you may expect. Khrushcheva is the biological great-grandaughter, and the adoptive granddaughter, of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. She remembered that Joseph Stalin frequently denounced his rivals as “enemies of the people.” Khrushcheva recalled that her great-grandfather deliberately avoided using that term to avoid the “sweeping denunciations of whole segments of the Soviet population” that were SOP in Stalin’s time.
For that reason, Khrushcheva was stunned to hear it being used in “a non-Soviet, moreover non-Stalinist” setting. She isn’t alone. Mitchell Orenstein, a professor of Russian and east European studies at Penn, recalled that in Stalin’s time, being branded an “enemy of the people” was “a label that meant death.” However, Orenstein thinks Trump is using it so often that he is “in the process of rendering it meaningless”–at least, to those who don’t know anything about the Soviet Union.
Stalin wasn’t the only dictator to use this term. His predecessor, Vladimir Lenin, used it fairly often as well. Additionally, the Nazis declared Jews to be “the sworn enemy of the German people.” And before then, the Jacobins branded their opponents as “enemies of the people” during the Reign of Terror.
In other words–Trump is in some very dubious company. You would think that a guy who is an Ivy Leaguer would have some sense of history. If he did, he would realize that maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to brand your foes with a term that was too toxic even for the Soviet Union. He’d also realize that even implicitly identifying yourself with the nation has serious consequences.
(featured image courtesy DonkeyHotey, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
