Fear and Loathing in the Oval Office

By Nina L. Khrushcheva

NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump has swiped another page from the authoritarian playbook. His verbal assault on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before camera-wielding media in the Oval Office amounted to precisely the kind of ritual humiliation autocrats have long used to elevate and amuse themselves – and intimidate everyone else.

One of history’s most notorious dictators, Joseph Stalin, regularly demeaned my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, and his politburo colleagues. As Khrushchev recounted much later, Stalin once made him dance the gopak, a Ukrainian folk dance, before some top party officials. “I had to squat down on my haunches and kick out my heels, which frankly wasn’t very easy for me,” he recalled. “But when Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.”

In orchestrating such spectacles, Stalin was surely motivated by the desire to keep his subordinates subordinated. But it was not all politically motivated: as Khrushchev noted, Stalin found others’ humiliation “amusing.” How could a megalomaniacal dictator not relish the sight of his empire’s most powerful men voluntarily debasing themselves to please him – the one figure who towered above them all?

Not even Stalin’s own children were exempt. During the last New Year’s celebration of his life, a drunken Stalin ordered his daughter Svetlana to entertain his guests by dancing before them. Khrushchev described the scene: “Stalin grabbed her by the forelock with his fist and pulled.” Despite her “face turning red and tears welling up in her eyes,” he “pulled harder,” dragging her back onto the dance floor.

Ritual humiliation was also a specialty of Mao Zedong. He forced Zhou Enlai – an architect of Chinese communism and the People’s Republic’s longest-serving premier – to perform self-effacing “rectification” monologues. These typically ended with Zhou gushing over Mao’s wisdom, which he had been too blind, or too morally corrupt, to see. But no matter how much Zhou debased himself, it would never be enough for Mao, who eventually denied Zhou cancer treatment.

To be sure, Trump is no Stalin or Mao, who were dictators of savage and serious purpose, bent on dragging their countries, kicking and screaming, to the summit of world power. (The other great twentieth-century dictator, Adolf Hitler, reserved his cruelty for those his racist ideology held to be inferior, while often serving as something of a marriage counselor for the Nazi elite – and even was a witness at the wedding of Joseph Goebbels, his notorious propaganda chief.)

Trump should be thought of as a dilettante despot, the Roman emperor of reality TV. Is anyone surprised that the man who concluded each episode of The Apprentice with a ritual firing would orchestrate demeaning spectacles in the Oval Office? After publicly berating Zelensky, the leader of a US ally and country at war, Trump said it himself: the episode was going to make “great television.”

Zelensky is not the only world leader whom Trump has publicly belittled. He recently mocked outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by calling him “governor” of the “great state of Canada.” Trudeau’s just-confirmed successor, Mark Carney, should brace himself for similar ridicule, which under Trump appears to be a new tool of US diplomacy.

Predictably, Trump has directed plenty of casual cruelty toward his opponents and detractors in the United States as well, performing offensive imitations and hurling playground insults. Trump appears to enjoy little more than coming up with the kinds of nicknames you might hear at a fraternity house: “Sleepy Joe” for former President Joe Biden, “Comrade Kamala” for former Vice President Kamala Harris, “Ron DeSanctimonious” for his Republican primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

But, like Stalin and Mao, Trump also delights in the debasement of his closest colleagues. His first cabinet meeting of the year was a carnival of sycophancy featuring some of the world’s most powerful men (and they are almost all men, though Attorney General Pam Bondi can brownnose with the best of them). Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person – apparently intending to set himself apart from the crowd – postured behind the table, wearing a “tech support” t-shirt and making only perfunctory nods towards Trump’s wisdom and leadership.

In a subsequent Cabinet meeting, Musk appeared somewhat chastened: this time, he wore a suit, per Trump’s demand. But he was also allowed to attack Secretary of State Marco Rubio for failing to fire enough staff, implying that all Rubio has going for him is being “good on TV.”

Nobody wants to be belittled in front of their colleagues, let alone TV cameras, weeks into their new job – especially by someone who does not belong there in the first place. But if Republicans have shown anything, it is that they will swallow any indignity to stay on Trump’s good side. They fawn, they submit, and remain silent – no matter how wayward and destructive his plans. Congressional Republicans cheer as the president forsakes what they previously defended, from economic openness to support for NATO to funding of basic science.

Much of the US media has also been cowed into submission. Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man (or third, depending on the stock market), has trashed the reputation of The Washington Post, which he owns, by announcing that the editorial page would effectively become a MAGA mouthpiece. ABC News, for its part, has done its groveling through its lawyers, by settling a defamation lawsuit it almost certainly would have won.

With Trump’s actions coming under increasing judicial scrutiny, the courts are almost certain to feel the heat of Trumpian intimidation. Should the judiciary also buckle, US democracy is likely to follow.