Idiots, Useful and Otherwise

• “Alex Salmond will present his weekly show on Russia Today again on Thursday, despite calls for him to quit the Kremlin-backed broadcaster. The former First Minister has been accused of being a ‘useful idiot’ for President Vladimir Putin.” —The Scotsman, March 19
• “In the words of Russian spyspeak, [Mark] Zuckerberg now counts — like our president — as a ‘useful idiot.’ He has contributed, and apparently continues to contribute, to the corruption of our democratic process.” —The Wrap, March 18
• “To make matters worse, the leader of the [British] opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, is behaving like a useful idiot, parroting Russia’s skepticism and calling for hard proof [of Russia’s attempted assassination of a former double agent in London].” —Maclean’s, March 15
• "[Former Trump adviser Carter] Page happens also to be highly sympathetic to the Putin regime. The Russian phrase for such characters is … useful idiot.” —Bret Stephens, The New York Times, February 2

The phrase “useful idiot” seems to be everywhere. The Oxford English Dictionary definition: "(originally) a citizen of a non-communist country sympathetic to communism who is regarded (by communists) as naïve and susceptible to manipulation for propaganda or other purposes; (more widely) any person similarly manipulable for political purposes.”

The person to whom it has most often recently been applied is Donald Trump. The first such reference I’ve been able to find was in July 2015, the month after he announced his candidacy for president. A columnist for the British newspaper The Telegraph wrote that Trump — whom everyone assumed had no chance in the primary, much less the election — was the Democrats’ “useful idiot": “By shouting so loudly about issues that the Left presumes the Right is obsessed with, he becomes a stick with which Democrats can hit Republicans.”

After Trump secured the nomination, the Times columnist Timothy Egan was one of the first to state (in September 2016) what has become a commonplace: “Trump is Russia’s useful idiot, dismissing its international aggressions and human rights violations. Putin can do no wrong because ‘if he says great things about me,’ as Trump said, ‘I’m going to say great things about him.’” Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright applied the term to Trump the following month.

Former CIA chief Michael Hayden, writing in the Washington Post five days before the election, cited his onetime colleague Michael Morell’s accusation that Putin had “cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” Hayden went on: “I’d prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That’s the useful fool, some naïf, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

When and by whom was “useful idiot” coined? The answer is murky. The OED’s first citation is a 1948 Times article quoting L’Umanita, an Italian “right-wing socialist newspaper” as saying, “the Communists would give the ‘useful idiots’ of the left-wing Socialist party the choice of merging with the Communist party or getting out.” However, after Zbigniew Brzezinski used the phrase in 1987, the Times language columnist William Safire investigated and found that it was commonly attributed to Lenin, to (in the words of a 1981 Times article) “describe left-liberals and Social Democrats.” But Safire couldn’t locate it in Lenin’s published works, and neither has anyone else.

The investigation led me to wonder whether “useful idiot” has any relation to “holy fool,” which in the Eastern Orthodox tradition refers to asceticism or other unconventional behavior in the service of Christ. I asked my neighbor Sibelan Forrester, a professor of Russian at Swarthmore College, and she responded that it’s a whole different thing.