Stephen Miller Wins This Week's Stalin Prize for Totalitarian Flattery

Yahoo

11-04-2025

We don't really learn anything new about Donald Trump anymore. He's the same old liar and buffoon he's been for 50 years. But sometimes we relearn the stuff we already knew in ways that are so shocking that we have to pause and take stock.
One of the old lessons we relearned this week has to do with Trump's adolescent need for constant praise, and the abject willingness of his sycophants to provide it without his having to ask—even, or especially, when the reality screams for rebuke.
This is a crucial point that needs to be widely understood, and will be by those with a living memory of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The operating principle of such regimes was this: The worse actual conditions were, the more fulsome the propaganda had to be. The crops yields were excellent, comrades! Our cars are far superior to the capitalists'! Prisons? What prisons?
Which brings us back to Trump's America, which isn't so different in key respects from Enver Hoxha's Albania. Here we have a week when Trump's bumbling, his stupidity, his willed ignorance of history, and his utter refusal to think through policy have never been more fully on display. With all this tariff flip-flopping, he very nearly launched a global economic crisis. As it is, he personally—no one else—cost investors, from large institutional ones to you and me, trillions of dollars. And the lower tariff rates he announced Wednesday as the bond market was about to explode are still the highest since the infamous Smoot-Hawley years.
It was a disaster in every way. And as such, it required an especially intense degree of obsequiousness.
Bill Ackman: 'This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.'
Karoline Leavitt (to White House reporters): 'Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.'
And the winner of this week's Stalin Prize, Stephen Miller: 'You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.'
For good measure, not exactly on the topic of the tariffs but nevertheless a Stalin Prize contender, we had Pam Bondi at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday: 'President, we've had some great wins in the last few days. You know, you were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority.'
Wait, what? 'President'? Not 'Mr. President'? Why? Because it's a little closer to 'El Presidente'? For the record, Trump won a plurality, not a majority, and he got four million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. But there's more: In her next sentence, Bondi invoked 'U.S. Americans.' I haven't heard that one since Miss Teen South Carolina in 2007.
If these people are right that Trump was acting the whole time with great intention, then we must seriously consider the allegation that he was manipulating the market with his Wednesday morning social media post about now being 'A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!' If he knew that morning that he was going to announce a pause that afternoon—an announcement that he had to know would send the market skyrocketing—then there's little question that his post constituted market manipulation. The best argument in Trump's defense here is a pretty pitiful one: that he's so incapable of thinking more than 15 minutes ahead that it's hard to believe he knew in the morning what he was going to do in the afternoon.
Regardless, we're in an unprecedentedly chilling era in American politics. Literally never in American history have presidential aides and supporters spoken quite like this, employing the kind of flattery one usually sees in totalitarian regimes (which are a couple ticks worse in general than authoritarian ones).
What does it tell us about the future? Trump is going to get worse. I think we can say that with confidence. Each week so far has been worse than the last, in terms of the assaults on democracy. His executive order this week concerning Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs is terrifying—perhaps the most frightening thing he's done yet in his war on political enemies. Telling the Justice Department to investigate specific individual Americans because of their political activity arguably goes further in turning the state into an instrument of his personal will than anything else he's done.
Bondi said we should rest assured that the Justice Department alone will make any prosecutorial decisions. But the mere fact that Justice is going to use resources to investigate these two men, who are guilty of nothing more than political advocacy Trump didn't like, has terrifying implications for every U.S. American out there.
So, yes, things will get even worse. And as they do, the sycophancy will grow ever more insistent and unapologetic. That's how it works. These attempts to win the Stalin Prize are so pathetic they're almost funny—but each one of them is also another assault on democratic values and customs. We can't forget this.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.