signalmankenneth
Verified User
After attending six President Trump rallies in October 2018, the New Yorker’sSusan Glasser wrote, “The biggest difference between Trump and any other American President, however, is not the bragging. It’s the cult of personality he has built around himself and which he insists upon at his rallies.” She added that he calls to the stage other Republican politicians who flatter him with lines like “Is he not the best President we have ever had?” and he is “the strongest President we have seen in our lifetime.”
The term “cult of personality” became prominent in the twentieth century in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev delivered a mind-boggling Secret Speech, “On The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” to the 20th Party Congress of the USSR’s Communist Party. In it he spoke at great length of the harm Stalin had done to the Soviet Union by fostering such a cult around himself: “The cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person.” Khrushchev also criticized Stalin for branding some of his political opponents as “enemies of the people,” and claimed “Stalin originated the concept enemy of the people.
This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven.” (Long before Stalin, however, the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen used the term, entitling one of his plays “An Enemy of the People.”)
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170236
The term “cult of personality” became prominent in the twentieth century in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev delivered a mind-boggling Secret Speech, “On The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” to the 20th Party Congress of the USSR’s Communist Party. In it he spoke at great length of the harm Stalin had done to the Soviet Union by fostering such a cult around himself: “The cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person.” Khrushchev also criticized Stalin for branding some of his political opponents as “enemies of the people,” and claimed “Stalin originated the concept enemy of the people.
This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven.” (Long before Stalin, however, the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen used the term, entitling one of his plays “An Enemy of the People.”)
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170236
