Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake is expected to make a speech in the Senate on Wednesday, and it is said he will reportedly compare the rhetoric of President Donald Trump to that of the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Several news outlets reported on excerpts from the anticipated speech.
Flake, a Republican senator who has often been critical of Trump, is expected to say that the President’s phrasing of the media as “the enemy of the people” is like “an assault as unprecedented as it is unwarranted,” CNN reported.
Sen. Jeff Flake is reportedly going to compare President Trump to the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. (Twitter)
“Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own President uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,” the excerpt reads, CNN reported. “It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase ‘enemy of the people,’ that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of ‘annihilating such individuals’ who disagreed with the supreme leader.”
Flake will also reportedly say that Trump’s actions as President should be “a great source of shame,” CNN reported.
“The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy,” the excerpt continues, CNN reported. “When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him ‘fake news,’ it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.”
Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until he died in 1953.
“Stalinism,” as it came to be known, included socialist theories and called for a centralized state, as well as the subordination of interests of other Communist parties to those interests of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
