Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase With a Fraught History

MOSCOW — The phrase was too toxic
even for Nikita Khrushchev , a war-
hardened veteran communist not
known for squeamishness. As leader
of the Soviet Union, he demanded an
end to the use of the term “enemy of
the people” because “it eliminated the
possibility of any kind of ideological
fight.”
“The formula ‘enemy of the people,’”
Mr. 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.
It is difficult to know if President
Trump is aware of the historic
resonance of the term, a label
generally associated with despotic
communist governments rather than
democracies. But his decision to
unleash the terminology has left some
historians scratching their heads. Why
would the elected leader of a
democratic nation embrace a label
that, after the death of Stalin, even the
Soviet Union found to be too freighted
with sinister connotations?
Nina Khrushcheva, the great-
granddaughter of Mr. Khrushchev and
a professor of international affairs at
the New School in New York, said the
phrase was “shocking to hear in a
non-Soviet, moreover non-Stalinist
setting.” Her great-grandfather, she
said, “of course also used Soviet
slogans and ideological idioms but still
tried to stay away from sweeping
denunciations of whole segments of
the Soviet population.”
In Mr. Trump’s case, however, he is
branding as enemies a segment of the
American population — specifically
representatives of what he calls the
“fake news” media, including The New
York Times.
He has used the phrase more than
once, including Friday during an
attack on the news media at a
conservative gathering in which he
said that some reporters were making
up unnamed sources to attack him.
“A few days ago, I called the fake news
the enemy of the people because they
have no sources — they just make it
up,” the president said, adding that
the label applied only to “dishonest”
reporters and editors. Hours later,
Sean Spicer, the White House press
secretary, barred journalists from
several news organizations, including
The Times, from attending a briefing
in his office.
By using the phrase and placing
himself in such infamous company, at
least in his choice of vocabulary to
attack his critics, Mr. Trump has
demonstrated, Ms. 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, Mr. 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 White House did not respond to a
request for comment.
The phrase “enemy of the people” first
entered the political lexicon in 1789,
with the French Revolution. The
revolutionaries initially used it as a
slogan that was hurled willy-nilly at
anybody who opposed them. But, as
resistance to the revolution mounted,
the term acquired a far more lethal
and legalistic meaning with the
adoption of a 1794 law that set up a
revolutionary tribunal “to punish
enemies of the people” and codified
political crimes punishable by death.
These included “spreading false news
to divide or trouble the people.”
The concept resurfaced in a more
benign form nearly a century later in
“An Enemy of the People,” an 1882
play by the Norwegian writer Henrik
Ibsen about an idealistic whistle-
blower in a small town at odds with
the 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,
drastically 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.
“In essence, it was a label that meant
death. It meant you were subhuman
and entirely expendable,” said
Mitchell A. Orenstein, professor of
Russian and East European Studies at
the University of Pennsylvania. “This
is the connotation for anyone who
lived in the Soviet Union or knows
anything about the Soviet Union,
which Donald Trump obviously
doesn’t — or he doesn’t care.”
He said that it was hard to figure out
whether Mr. 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,” Mr. Orenstein continued.
“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,” Mr.
Orenstein said. “It becomes just na-
na-na-na-na,” he added, because
nobody really thinks Mr. 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 Mr. Trump delighted in “shaking
things up, and this kind of language
does just that.”
“We try to analyze it from an
establishment point of view, but this
leads nowhere,” he added. “I don’t
know if Trump has ever read Stalin,
but if he wants to destabilize people,
he is doing it perfectly.”
William Taubman, the author of a
biography of Khrushchev and emeritus
professor of political science at
Amherst College, said it was
“shocking” that Mr. Trump would
revive a term that had fallen into
disrepute in the Soviet Union after
Stalin’s death in 1953. “It was so
omnipresent, freighted and
devastating in its use under Stalin that
nobody wanted to touch it,” he said. “I
have never heard it used in Russia
except in reference to history and in
jokes.”
Ms. Khrushcheva said that Mr. Trump
has “been using a lot of this kind of
political-ideological branding” favored
by revolutionary leaders, deploying
terms like “liberal sympathizer” and
“language about gloom and doom in
America that is much more forcefully
negative than that even used by the
Russians.”
He has also gone one step further than
Chinese and Khmer Rouge communists
in Cambodia, who generally preferred
homegrown insults to those imported
from the Soviet Union.
Mr. Short, the Mao and Pol Pot
biographer, said Chinese and
Cambodian communists, all fiercely
nationalistic, rarely if ever used
“enemy of the people” in domestic
political struggles because it was an
alien import. Instead, Pol Pot attacked
enemies as “ugly microbes” who
would “rot society, rot the party and
rot the country from within,” while
Maoists coined insults like “the
stinking ninth category” to denounce
experts and intellectuals.
Mao, Mr. Short said, “used Chinese
expressions and spoke like a Chinese,
not a Russian.”
“He did not use the Soviet jargon
much,” Mr. Short said. “But Mr.
Trump does, which is extraordinary.”
Mao did on occasion use “enemy of
the people,” but he directed it not at
his domestic foes but at the United
States, declaring in 1964 that “U.S.
imperialism is the most ferocious
enemy of the people of the entire
world.”
“Politicians normally use phrases that
resonate with their own people,” Mr.
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.”