President Donald Trump will be remembered like Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, author says: ‘Stalin was exactly the same as Trump’
Australian journalist and author Malcolm Knox delivered a scathing assessment of how President Donald Trump will be remembered by history, drawing a direct comparison between the American leader and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Knox, who has written for The Sydney Morning Herald since 1994 and has won three Walkley Awards and a Human Rights Award, made the comments to The Guardian while promoting his new novel, The Second Child.
The comparison
Speaking to The Guardian, Knox argued that Trump shares Stalin’s obsession with self-glorification and permanence.
“Stalin was exactly the same as Trump, wanting to put his name on everything, creating this cult of personality, this striving for permanence,” Knox said. “Nobody did that more than Stalin, nobody had the power to do that more than Stalin.”
Despite the grim subject matter of his work, Knox expressed optimism that dictators will ultimately be judged harshly by history. He said he has a sense of optimism that such leaders “will reap what they sow in terms of the way they are remembered.”
He went further, predicting that Trump’s legacy will fade just as those of other historical strongmen have.
“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,” Knox said.
The author also pointed to what he described as a detachment from reality among leaders wielding extreme power, referencing the image of “Trump sitting in his bed watching footage of people getting killed on his order.”
The books behind the comments
Knox’s comments came as he promoted The Second Child, the sequel to his 2024 historical thriller The First Friend. The first novel was largely set in 1938 Georgia and followed the fraught relationship between Lavrentiy Beria, the newly appointed head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and his childhood friend-turned-valet, the fictional Vasil Murtov. The novel was long-listed for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
The Second Child — described as a mix of satire, spoof, fact and alternative history with a heavy dose of black humor — is set in the dying days of World War II. It opens after the Tehran and Yalta peace conferences have concluded, with negotiations set to move to Potsdam, where Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would finalize plans for dividing the spoils of war.
The story follows Melor Murtova, the daughter of the first book’s protagonist, who returns from exile to become Beria’s adopted daughter and an informant among the children of the Kremlin elite while secretly investigating who murdered her own parents.
Knox told The Guardian that the history he drew on for the book was “bursting with incident and stories that are too good to leave out – and too true, too resonant to the current time.”
Knox said he does not consider himself finished exploring this period of Soviet history. He intends to continue following Beria and Stalin’s story to its end, where he suggests even history’s most brutal, post-truth rulers ultimately lose control of their own narrative.
Donald Trump’s pattern of renaming places after himself
In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The Trump administration cited the order as establishing a policy of naming great natural landmarks after the country’s shared achievements.
Trump extended that approach when he signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” making the change “effective immediately” amid an ongoing trade war between the United States and Canada. He told reporters — flanked by large display boards reading “Lake America” — that the change was “something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”
Trump said his administration had “filed all of the necessary papers, documents, [and] everything else” and had “notified all of the various people you have to notify.” The executive order specified that the changes were to be made within 30 days and directed the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service.
The order argued that the United States claims most of the lake’s volume because its deepest waters lie within U.S. territory. It also described the lake as “an integral asset to American exploration, settlement, commerce and defense.”
The move drew swift pushback from Canadian officials. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney noted on social media that the name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, meaning “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big,” and dates back more than 400 years, predating both Canadian Confederation and the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Canada’s Conservative Party opposition leader Pierre Poilievre said no executive order would change the lake’s name and that Trump does not have the right to rename it “on a whim.” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston called the move “some real foolishness,” while Ontario Premier Doug Ford said “no one” would follow Trump’s lead in using the new name. Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott also criticized the decision as “petty and disappointing.”
Public Reaction
A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 14% of Americans support the renaming, even as Google and Apple updated the name on their map applications.
Trump, meanwhile, has mused about extending the naming pattern further, saying, “If you think about it, we have a gulf, now we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”