Fake President

Trump refers to media outlets (that he has dubbed the "fake news media") as "the enemy of the People ."

The phrase "the enemy of the people" has a long history that Trump may not know about.

Over the course of the last century, it has been used by dictators and autocrats to delegitimize opposition and dissenters.

It came into use in the modern period during the Third Reich's rule in Germany. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels referred to Jews as "a sworn enemy of the German people" who posed a risk to Adolf Hitler's vision.

It gained its widest use by Joseph Stalin. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin used the term vrag naroda (enemy of the nation/people) to refer to those who disagreed with the ideologies pushed forth by the Bolsheviks. This could include anyone from clergy to writers to political opposition. Later coined by Stalin, such a designation meant immediate imprisonment.

"All leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before the revolutionary court," said Lenin in November 1917.

The phrase lost popularity when Nikita Khrushchev came into power and denounced Lenin and Stalin's use of the term.

"The formula 'enemy of the people was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals," Khrushchev said in a 1956 speech to the Soviet Communist Party . Nina Khruscheva, Khruschev's great-granddaughter and international affairs professor at the New School in New York, told The New York Times that it was particularly shocking to hear the language of "state nationalism [that] is… the same regardless of the country."