The Trump-flatterers
On the psychology of self-abasement
In the Spring of 1937 Joseph Stalin decided he was fed up with all the flattery. A special cable from the Moscow correspondent, Harold Denny formed the body of a story in The New York Times of March 29 which was headlined “STALIN CALLS HALT ON FULSOME PRAISE: Cracks Down on Flattery of Him and All Other Soviet Leaders as 'Complacent'”.
The Soviet dictator was then in full purge mode, and his address to the central committee of the Communist Party came in a hiatus between two major trials – one for show and one in secret – the first aimed at senior former followers of Leon Trotsky and the second which got rid of the top leadership of the Red Army. So one can imagine the confusion that the general secretary’s speech caused among loyal flatterers. What to do? If you suddenly stopped saying that Stalin was the sun around which the new worker’s world revolved would that be a sign of obedience or of backsliding? And should you now add excessive Stalin worshippers to your list of people to be reported to the authorities?
By 1937 Stalin had already had four Soviet cities renamed after him, plus a major mountain in Tajikistan and innumerable collective farms and tractor factories, (and if you think that was bad, consider the citizens of Perm who found their leaders petitioning to rename their city after the apparatchik’s apparatchik, Vyacheslav Molotov) so he may have considered that sufficient for posterity.
‘The greatest economic master strategy”
I was put in mind of this speech by recent events in the United States. On the 28thJanuary this year a first term Florida Congresswoman, Anna Paulina Luna tabled House Resolution 792, “To direct the Secretary of the Interior to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial”. On Fox News’s show My View With Lara Trump, the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told his host that there certainly was room up there for her father-in-law.
Five days earlier another freshman member of Congress, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, tabled a resolution “to rename Washington Dulles international airport to Donald J. Trump international airport. In his press release McDowell explained that this was “only right” because "we have entered the golden age of America largely thanks to President Trump's leadership”. One of the bill’s several co-sponsors Congressman Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania hoped that such a move would “cement (Trump’s) status in our nation’s capital as our fearless commander-in-chief, extraordinary leader, and relentless champion for the American people.”
Around the same time their colleague Brandon Gill from Texas tabled his bill, entitled the Golden Age Act of 2025, legislating for the hundred-dollar bill to carry the portrait of Trump and the New York Republican Claudia Tenney sought to make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, since he was “the founder of America’s Golden Age”.
On 10th April in a televised segment of Trump’s cabinet meeting he went round the table for what were ostensibly sitreps, but which turned into a series of inflated promises of what was soon to be achieved as a result of Trump’s miraculous qualities. The commerce secretary Howard Lutnick described a queue of unspecified nations seeking to do unquantified deals, having “come with offers that they never, ever, ever would have come with but for the moves that the President has made, demanding that people treat the United States with respect.” The Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump, “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority. The Americans want you to be president because of your agenda, and the courts are ruling that you have the authority to determine how the money of this country will be spent. That's what the American citizens wanted, and that's what they're getting.” And so on. Trump sat contented, quiet, a small smirk playing around those prehensile lips, complacently receiving what he already knew to be his due.
A few days later the deputy chief of policy and actual brains in the White House, Stephen Miller informed everyone who had witnessed the fiasco of Trump’s Liberation Day speech on tariffs that, “you have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.”
Drowning in ordure
History and literature are not kind to flatterers or to the flattered - unless like Canute they reject the excessive praise. I struggle to recall a single instance from fiction or historiography in which the toady turns out to be the hero, or where the wise ruler does anything other than dismiss the sycophant.