October 29: On This Day In 2018
{Programming note: Just a reminder, if you missed it, to check out the video made by our collaborators re yesterday's OTDI. It's the third time we've linked up to cover the topic of the day; click here to see their clever take on Instagram or here for YouTube.}
In 1882, Henrik Ibsen published “An Enemy of the People,” a play about a physician who exposes an inconvenient truth. Here's the "playbill" of its performance.
Presumably Trump came across this "Enemy of the People" phrase in his bedtime reading, and that's how he unconsciously began sprinkling it into his speeches. Nah. Actually, he borrowed it from dictators such as Stalin, Mao, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. All of them applied this formulaic phrase to their detractors, especially those in the press. Trump, like autocrats before him, understood the power of defining a common enemy.
Early in his regime, Trump seemed satisfied with accusing journalists of spreading “fake news.” But OTDI 2018, Trump ratcheted his hatred up several levels and began to employ the infamous “enemy” label:
Btw, is ALL the press “the enemy of the people?” No, only about 80% of it, Trump later clarified.
Hitler’s propaganda team also used that phrase to refer to Jews. They used it so frequently during the 1930s that by the time they started trying to kill every Jew in the 1940s, the German citizenry had come to accept that it was true.
It’s never a good look when your favorite phrase was also a crucial tool of the Nazi killing machine.
Note: On This Day In The Trump Administration reminds and educates voters about what he did during his four years as president. But it's obvious that this type of filth has flowed from the lips of Trump and his public relations team much more freely in recent years. And rather than pretending to care that he'll stare down our adversaries in, say, Russia, Trump is essentially focusing these days on the punishment he'll inflict on American citizens in this country. And how he'll use the military to do so.
As Bill Kristol noted about Trump's rally two days ago, "He was also happy to attack Americans of any color or national origin who oppose his campaign: 'They are indeed the enemy from within,' and 'the most sinister and corrupt forces on earth,'" Trump insisted.
Trump has been using "enemy within" so often that it mostly gets ignored, but he's referring to any American who opposes him.
Miller: Many of Trump's advisors over the years fled his cultish orbit and wrote, traumatized, about the tyrant they had seen up close. Kudos to them for alerting the world. But one guy has remained Trumpy to his very core: Stephen Miller, arguably the architect of Trump's worst anti-human policies. Constitutional law luminary Laurence Tribe commented on Miller's Sunday speech:
Philip Bump, at the WaPo, goes into more detail about how similar Trump's rally was to the 1939 event at Madison Square Garden. (And let's hope Bump will publish as freely and brilliantly as he does now under a second Trump regime; his boss has apparently already been chilled).
At this stage, it’s pretty clear who the real enemy of the United States is.
Check out the Daily Show's take:
Dive Deeper
Business Insider’s report on the ugly history of ”enemy of the people” phrase
The Washington Post weighed in on Trump’s use of that mantra in 2018
The WaPo has that 80% answer you needed (But, of course, that was then, now it may be higher)
The Guardian lists other “enemies.”
On This Day In The Trump Administration: Trump is the Enemy of the People