Report: Flake to compare Trump’s media attacks, Stalin in Senate speech

PHOENIX — U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) will reportedly address President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media and compare his use of “enemy of the people” when referring to the press to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

In an interview with This Week ABC, the Arizona senator said Trump’s repeated attacks on the media has “real damage to our standing in the world.”

“What I’m trying to say is, you can talk about crowd size and that is pretty innocuous if there is a falsehood there. But when you reflexively refer to the press as the ‘enemy of the people’ or ‘fake news,’ that has real damage,” Flake said.

“And I noted how bad it is for a president to take what was popularized by Joseph Stalin — ‘the enemy of the people’ to refer to the press — and today you have authoritarians across the world using the term ‘fake news’ to justify cracking down on their opposition or to staunch legitimate debate. That’s nothing we should be proud of.”

Flake later added that he is planning to denounce the president’s comments in a Senate floor speech on Wednesday, the same day that Trump said he will hold a “Fake News Awards” ceremony for “the most corrupt and biased of the Mainstream Media.”

It was reported last year that the junior senator, who is not running for re-election, would hold a series of speeches on the Senate floor to address the importance of facts and the truth.

According to ABC News, Flake will start his speech addressing 2017 as the year when the truth was “more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country.”

“It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press was launched by that same White House, an assault that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted. ‘The enemy of the people,’ was what the president of the United States called the free press in 2017,” Flake is expected to say.

“It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies,” he will say. “This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the president’s party. For they are shameful, repulsive statements.”

In an interview with NBC News’ Kasie Hunt on Sunday, Flake said he will use the speech to “nudge the president back where I think that we, as elected officials, ought to be. And I think that that’s a role that I should have as a member of the Senate.”

“We have a balance of power, separated powers here. We shouldn’t all be afraid to criticize the president when we think he’s wrong,” Flake said.

Flake disputed a suggestion that his speech would compare Trump to the former Soviet dictator. During an interview with CNN, Flake said “Joseph Stalin was a killer, our president is not.”

Flake also further clarified his intentions on social media.

There is no comparison between POTUS & Stalin. Stalin was a maniacal killer. The point I will try to make in my speech is POTUS should not use a phrase so associated with Stalin like “enemy of the people” to describe our free press. https://t.co/RglEML84vz

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) January 15, 2018

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