For all their colorful personality quirks, history’s infamous dictators are surprisingly of a kind. They tend to be buffoonish, narcissistic, petty, vengeful, shameless, and utterly free of self-doubt. And they use the same set of basic tools to manage their cult following.
Those who wonder why President Donald Trump keeps insisting, in the face of clear and conclusive evidence to the contrary, that he won this year’s presidential election by a landslide and that his victory was stolen in a massive conspiracy, need only to recall Stalin’s show trials. The Soviet Union was surely different from the United States and the context was different as well, but the underlying principles were identical and both leaders pursued similar goals.
Soviet show trials took place in 1936-38 and included three so-called Moscow Trials, in which a number of high-level Bolshevik leaders were convicted, as well as the Tukhachevsky Trial, which featured top Red Army commanders.
The trials were a way for Josef Stalin to eliminate rivals, settle old scores and curb the threat of a military coup. But the charges against the defendants went completely overboard, being outlandish and completely lacking verisimilitude. They included a claim that life-long revolutionaries and Vladimire Lenin’s closest associates had been czarist informants. Or that the military commanders had been preparing a joint German-Polish offensive. Or that the accused had spied for Germany, Britain, Japan and other foreign powers, all at the same time.
The Nazis were especially bemused by the assertion that their rabidly anti-Semitic government had been in cahoots with Jewish Bolsheviks Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek, hoping to install them as Soviet leaders.
In the minds of true believers, this phantasmagorical accumulation of crimes created a picture of a dangerous world ruled by insidious dark forces. Only Stalin could lay bare their devious plans and only Stalin could protect them.
Trump has used the same trick a number of times. He has told his Evangelical constituency that he is the only one who can save them from persecution and bring back Christmas. He has assured suburban housewives that he alone can keep Antifa thugs off their manicured lawns. He and no one else can save America from communism, China and the globalist government.
Much like the devious international imperialism that was exposed at Stalin’s show trials, America’s enemies are all-powerful. They own or control the media, the intelligence services, the courts, the Deep State and every other institution you can think of. And if you can’t see that you are either blind or an agent of those same evil forces.
The scary tales of global conspiracy are part of the overall strategy designed for the consumption of the credulous. Far more important for any dictator is to identify those in his entourage who are not completely loyal, who have retained some sense of decency and moral fiber and who have the courage to speak out. This is why the lies have to be brazen, transparent and utterly implausible.
Indeed, no one who wasn’t in the cult could have believed all the bizarre allegations against the Bolshevik Old Guard — especially since no evidence was presented aside from the confessions that had been clearly beaten out of the defendants. But their long-time party comrades were required to sign off on their death sentences while various public figures, including journalists, scientists and writers, had to publicly express their joy over their execution. Any sign of hesitation was duly noted and those were dealt with in their turn.
So when you hear Trump or Rudy Giuliani or Roger Stone or any other Trump proxy advance wacky conspiracy theories about China, Venezuela and North Korea, and when they talk of Trump’s landslide victory without providing any proof, see it for what it is: a loyalty test for Trumpism. The 17 Republican state attorneys general who backed the Texas attempt to get the election result overturned, the 100-plus Republican members of Congress who joined them, Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Ted Cruz and others knew from the start that the lawsuit was nonsense, just as many people in the Soviet Union knew in the 1930s that the show trials were a macabre piece of theater. But just like their Soviet predecessors, the Republicans in today’s America passed the loyalty test.
After the purges, Stalin transformed the Bolshevik party into his own fiefdom. Lenin had been a murderous tyrant, but with him the Bolsheviks still had other leaders who headed their own factions and had their own vision of what socialism would mean. When Stalin took control all that disappeared. The communist ideology became what Stalin declared it to be, and the entire country shifted back and forth along with his whims.
The Republicans have given Trump plenty of demonstrations of their fealty: after the Mueller investigation, during the impeachment trial in the Senate and at their 2020 party convention, when they ditched their platform basically stating that they stood for Trump and nothing else. Since Trump’s election loss the cowardly orgy of genuflexion has been unprecedented in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The problem is that it is not nearly enough. There is still Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and other party stalwarts who have their own agendas and standing, and who won’t hesitate to stab Trump in the back if that could advance their own careers.
And so last Saturday in Washington, Trump’s faithful were chanting “Destroy the GOP” and “RINOs”. All those big names and big egos may avoid sharing the gruesome fate of Stalin’s rivals Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and countless others.
But they will have to ride into the sunset one way or another because there is only one GOP and it is now Trump’s own party.
