An award-winning author has compared President Donald Trump to some of history’s most notorious dictators.
Malcolm Knox, whose historical novels have charted the regimes of monsters including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, said the shadow of Trump loomed over his work.
He said Trump’s vainglorious efforts to rename everything in his honor and build monuments to himself were “exactly the same” as the propaganda efforts of the infamous Soviet leader. Historians estimate that Stalin executed around 750,000 of his own people and sent millions more to die in the gulags of Siberia.
Knox’s new book, The Second Child, is a sequel to the historical thriller The First Friend, which was set in the Soviet Union in 1938. The books, which explore Europe up until 1945, feature paranoia, power struggles, and survival surrounded by madmen.
The writer compared Trump’s actions as president to those of notorious autocrats including Stalin, which he said remain “resonant to the current time.”
“When I was writing The First Friend, I certainly thought that we’d seen the last of Trump as a president; we were in the post-Trump era, [but] writing about dictators still felt very relevant because of all the others,” Knox told The Guardian.
Referencing the detachment from reality of “Trump sitting in his bed watching footage of people getting killed on his order,” the author expressed his feelings on how the U.S. president and other extreme leaders will go down in history.
Noting he was optimistic the leaders “will reap what they sow in terms of the way they are remembered,” Knox said, “Stalin was exactly the same as Trump, wanting to put his name on everything, creating this cult of personality, this striving for permanence.”
He added, “Nobody did that more than Stalin, nobody had the power to do that more than Stalin. And yet, a year after he was dead, it was all being unwound, it all turned to s--t. The sun will come up, the sun will go down, and Trump’s name will turn to dust, just as every other dictator’s name has.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Knox has been writing for the Sydney Morning Herald since 1994 and has won three Walkley Awards and a Human Rights Award.
Trump’s latest target to rebrand in his likeness is the Strait of Hormuz, which has become a flashpoint in his war with Iran.
The 80-year-old posted on Truth Social on Wednesday “Should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
On Thursday, Trump was asked how serious he was about renaming the strait, admitting “it was just fun, it was just thrown out there.”
Trump caused controversy after signing an executive order last week to rebrand Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” and also suggested renaming the Pacific or Atlantic oceans after himself.
