The economy is taking a pummelling from all the uncertainty he has generated and his erratic on-off-on again tariffs, with one big donor to Trump’s campaign suggesting the US ‘has become 20% poorer in 4 weeks’ due to a fall in the dollar on the foreign exchange markets. His administration is unlawfully deporting US-born children, including some with cancer, detaining tourists and even American citizens returning from overseas trips. He is going after legal firms, the news media, universities, his political opponents, and even his own central bank chairman.
Entire Congressionally approved government agencies are being shut down and federal employees are fired for no reason with some then being reinstated by the courts or rehired because they were found to be essential workers. Trump is engaging in corruption on a scale that would embarrass Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, even halting the prosecution of US firms accused of bribery abroad. He is openly threatening to annex America's neighbours.
Agriculture is being systematically destroyed by tariffs imposed by China in response to Trump's tariffs on them. Tourism is being throttled as potential visitors note they're at risk of being held for minor infringements or in some cases, no reason at all.
The next things for the chop are Medicare and Medicaid, government-funded programmes that provide low-cost healthcare for the poor and elderly. None of this is calculated to garner any popularity beyond the billionaires who are the likely beneficiaries of tax cuts coming down the line.
At some point, admittedly maybe not until it’s all over, the party will need to repudiate Trumpism, as the communists did Joseph Stalin in 1956.
A little over 69 years ago, Nikita Khrushchev, then general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, stood up at the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow and delivered a speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” a scathing condemnation of Stalin who had died three years before.
It had taken three years for the leadership of the USSR to admit that Stalin had been a monster, responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, including the men serving in the military whose lives were needlessly thrown away by Stalin’s mismanagement of the Great Patriotic War. During Stalin’s life, he also ruled through fear.
I went back and read through this so-called ‘secret speech’ (it wasn’t officially made public in Russia until 1989, although Western intelligence agencies knew about it the day after it was delivered) and there are a lot of parallels. Trump isn’t anywhere close to being as bloodthirsty but in narcissism, he is easily Stalin’s equal.
Khrushchev said the party was concerned "with how the cult of the person of Stalin has been gradually growing, the cult which became at a certain specific stage the source of a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy, of revolutionary legality."
In a post-war film about the fall of Berlin, Stalin is portrayed as the supreme commander making all the decisions, to which Kruschev asks:
"And where is the military command? Where is the Politburo? Where is the Government? What are they doing, and with what are they engaged? There is nothing about them in the film. Stalin acts for everybody, he does not reckon with anyone. He asks no one for advice. Everything is shown to the people in this false light. Why? To surround Stalin with glory-- contrary to the facts and contrary to historical truth."
Isn't this what Trump is doing to the American government?
Stalin even edited a short biography of his life published in 1948 which contained "the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead" and then personally adding in his own praise of himself where he thought the authors hadn't glorified him sufficiently. This was one:
"Although he performed his tasks as leader of the Party and the people with consummate skill, and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation." These words were annotated in Stalin's own handwriting. You can easily imagine Trump doing the same.
And, as Stalin became paranoid about plotters he started a wave of arrests, not just against his political opponents of which there were few left, but his own party apparatchiks:
"What is the reason that mass repressions against activists increased more and more after the 17th Party Congress? It was because at that time Stalin had so elevated himself above the Party and above the nation that he ceased to consider either the Central Committee or the Party."
As one of his colleagues once wryly noted: "It has happened sometimes that a man goes to Stalin on his invitation as a friend. And when he sits with Stalin, he does not know where he will be sent next -- home or to jail."
Someone suggested Trump is Russifying America. He also wants compliant cowards and sycophants around him, people fearful of him and what he might do to them. That said, I wonder who will be the first senior MAGA GOP leader to denounce Trump and Trumpism and attempt to distance the party from the cult surrounding him, as Kruschev did in 1956. It’s a delicate balance isn't it?
There is a story (probably apocryphal) that Kruschev took questions from the floor after his speech. These were written down and passed up to the leaders on stage. One question was: "If all you say about Stalin is true, what were you doing at the time?"
It was a good question. Khrushchev read it out to the assembled delegates.
He is said to have looked up and asked: "Who asked this?" No one responded.
"That's what I was doing," Khrushchev said.
It's what far too many in the Republican party are doing now.
