Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase With a Fraught History
Mr. Trump said that 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.
William Taubman said that I don’t know if Trump has ever read Stalin, but if he wants to destabilize people, he is doing it perfectly.
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.
Mr. Trump said that I have never heard it used in Russia except in reference to history and in jokes.
