On Wednesday or thereabouts Republican Sen. Jeff Flake plans to waste all our time blasting Donald Trump for being a divisive anti-American shithole, or maybe shithouse, while continuing to do nothing much to oppose Trump's actual divisive anti-American policies.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) plans to give a speech in the coming days that compares President Trump’s public criticism of the news media to similar comments once made by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Whether you welcome this move or just consider it a publicity stunt on Flake's part is probably a good measure of your general cynicism, at this point. Flake has a history of talking big and then voting for whatever Trump and the rest of his Republican Party wants; his willingness to be a thorn in the side of his party extends only to speech-making. But on the other hand, Flake is the only member of a Republican Senate full of cowards unwilling to do even that much.
Flake plans to use his upcoming speech to denounce Trump for calling the news media “the enemy of the American people” last year. [...]
“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,” Flake will say, according to the excerpts. “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 is attacking rather narrowly here. The declaration that a free press is the enemy of the state is not a Soviet invention, but the hallmark of authoritarian regimes worldwide.
Flake is probably calculating that declaring it to be a communist tactic will alarm his base more than calling it a dictatorial or fascist or anti-democratic attack. He also appears to be confining his outrage to Trump himself, rather than pointing out that this same enemy of the people rhetoric is a staple of Fox News punditry and is omnipresent in the lower ranks of conservative shouters. His fellow legislators have embraced those same attacks as well. Mentioning that his entire party has fallen into the same rhetoric in their attacks on the very notion of objective, reportable truth is, one presumes, a speech too far.
So this is a thing that will happen. You are free to praise Flake for having the courage to make a speech that not a single other Republican senator has the spine to themselves make, or you can roll your eyes at him for continuing to act as mere party apparatchik five minutes before the speech and five minutes afterward. It feels like not much indeed, but it is undeniable that calling Trump out on his explicitly anti-democratic rhetoric is far, far more than any of Flake’s cowardly and enabling colleagues have been able to muster.