"The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator," Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov wrote in 1901, "but also a collective organizer of the masses." Ulyanov, also known as Vladimir Lenin, couldn't have penned a better description of Donald Trump's media strategy today. Lenin wrote the line when he was editor of Iskra, a newspaper published by revolutionary exiles who smuggled it into Russia hoping to fire up opposition to the Czar's regime. Whether he credits the source or not, that Trump is channeling the former Soviet Union's founding father is as plain as the crossed hammer and sickle on the failed communist empire's national flag.

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