Trump’s Press Secretary Is A Stalinist Or Something

Usually, people in the Media Industrial Complex (MIC) go with fascist or some sort of Nazi/Hitler reference. This is a new one by Excitable Richard Cohen at the Washington Post

Sean Spicer’s Stalinist apparition

Sean Spicer is the appropriate face of the new Trump administration. He is the White House press secretary, the spokesman and all of that, and he came into the briefing room on Saturday wearing the blank expression of Laurence Harvey after turning over the queen of diamonds in “The Manchurian Candidate.” You’ve heard of a molotov cocktail. Spicer was wearing a molotov face.

Vyacheslav Molotov was Joseph Stalin’s foreign minister. He was so scared of Stalin that when the Soviet dictator ordered Molotov’s wife exiled to Siberia and called for a vote by the leadership on the issue, Molotov abstained. In his dealing with foreign governments, Molotov never strayed from Stalin’s line, no matter how unreasonable. When confronted with facts, logic or the truth, he might break into a sweat. Usually, though, he just looked like Spicer. (snip)

Trump is a human dust devil, spinning off analogies and references. He is Orwellian, Kafkaesque and always chillingly demagogic. He vilifies the press as Hitler and others once vilified Jews — mysterious, powerful, deceitful, unpatriotic. He looks to his schoolboy past for an American future — a tall country in a world otherwise flattened by World War II — and he blames the relative decline not on automation or the inevitable rise of China, but on the indifference and selfishness of the establishment. Like a sleepy child in a creaking house, he imagines boogeymen everywhere.

Whoops, there’s the Hitler reference!

Finally, we have the Stalinist apparition of Sean Spicer, running through his several paragraphs of deceit Saturday like a hostage fearing for his life — or Molotov remembering that his wife, whom he adored, was in Stalin’s gulag. What does a press secretary have but his own credibility? Richard Nixon over time shredded Ronald Ziegler of his, but Nixon’s lies were for a time unprovable. Not so Trump’s. He stood before the wall of the fallen and said his differences with the CIA were concocted by the media. He lied about that, then lied about the turnout for his inaugural address, and then shoved Spicer out into the briefing room to lie about the lies. Trump wants to destroy his enemies. First, though, he’ll destroy his friends.

Good grief. Will the MIC folks be able to keep their apoplexy going strong for the next 4 years? Will they ever realize that Trump beat them like a rented mule, and that their credibility is gone? And that Trump is not your standard Republican, and will not be cowed by the MIC like most elected Republican officials? That he will fight back on a constant basis? Probably not.