Trump embraces loaded phrase 'Enemy of the People'


Trump embraces loaded phrase 'Enemy of the People'


“The formula ‘enemy of the people,’ ” Khrushchev told the Soviet Communist Party in a 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, “was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader.



In Trump’s case, however, he is branding as enemies a segment of the U.S. population — specifically representatives of what he calls the “fake news” media, including The New York Times.



By using the phrase and placing himself in such infamous company, at least in his choice of vocabulary to attack his critics, Trump has demonstrated, Khrushcheva said, that the language of “autocracy, of state nationalism is always the same regardless of the country, and no nation is exempt.” She added that, in all likelihood, Trump had not read Lenin, Stalin or Mao Zedong, but the “formulas of insult, humiliation, domination, branding, enemy-forming and name calling are always the same.”



The concept resurfaced in a more benign form nearly a century later in “An Enemy of the People,” an 1882 play by Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen about an idealistic whistleblower in a small town at odds with authorities and locals who, to protect the economy, want to suppress information about water contamination. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 returned the term to the blood-drenched dramas of the French Revolution, with Lenin declaring in Pravda that the Jacobin terror against “enemies of the people” was “instructive” and needed to be revived, so as to rid the Russian people of “landowners and capitalists as a class.”

Stalin, who took over as Soviet leader upon Lenin’s death in 1924, dramatically expanded the scope of those branded as “enemies of the people,” targeting not only capitalists but also dedicated communists who had worked alongside Lenin for years, but whom Stalin viewed as rivals.


He said that it was hard to figure out whether Trump was aware of the resonance of the phrase or simply used it because “he knows it riles up people who have a certain degree of knowledge. He is only alienating them, and they are the people he wants to alienate anyway. His base sees comparisons with Stalin as just more evidence of the liberal mainstream media going haywire.”

Moreover, by using such a loaded term in such a cavalier fashion, the president “is in the process of rendering it meaningless,” Orenstein said. “It becomes just na-na-na-na-na,” he added, because nobody really thinks Trump will bring back the guillotine.

Philip Short, a British author who has written biographies of Mao and Cambodia’s genocidal leader Pol Pot, said Trump delighted in “shaking things up, and this kind of language does just that.”






Mao, Short said, “used Chinese expressions and spoke like a Chinese, not a Russian. He did not use the Soviet jargon much. But Trump does, which is extraordinary.”


“Politicians normally use phrases that resonate with their own people,” Short said. “Mao and Pol Pot did not just regurgitate Stalinist terms. What is extraordinary about Trump is that he has taken up a Stalinist phrase that is entirely alien to American political culture.”


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