Sen. Jeff Flake’s latest attempt to put the spotlight on himself is to compare President Trump to former Soviet communist dictator Josef Stalin. And then the Arizona Republican threw in a comparison to former Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong as well.

Criticizing President Trump’s belief that the media are the “enemy of the people,” Flake told MSNBC on Sunday that the phrase was “was popularized by Josef Stalin, used by Mao as well – enemy of the people.”

Flake intends to say the same thing in a big speech on the Senate floor this week. We know all this because Flake is pushing this as hard as possible to the one constituency he knows supports him: the national news media. They have one thing in common: They hate Donald Trump.

Consider what Flake is doing as an audition for the role of special “contributor” to CNN or MSNBC. One wonders what the job description entails. Perhaps the following:

No need to know your history. It just sounds so good to compare Trump to Stalin, doesn’t it? Flake suggests they have the same contempt for the media, and therefore, the truth. There’s only one problem. While Trump might criticize the media. Stalin controlled it. Trump might say the national press is the enemy. Stalin owned the press.

No need to be accurate. In one excerpt of his speech, Flake states that “2017 was a year that saw the truth … more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government. It was a year which saw the White House enshrine ‘alternative facts’ into the lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods.”

Speaking of falsehoods, how many hundreds of times have the media twisted events to savage President Trump? How many times have they admitted good old-fashioned falsehoods? Truly, I’ve lost count. But this would mean castigating the media. Not one word of that from Flake. It’s all President Trump’s fault – yet one more falsehood.

No need to honor your promises to your constituents. It’s a fact of life Flake cannot deny, and his constituents will not let him forget. Flake was put in the Senate by the Tea Party after committing himself to fulfilling that movement’s agenda. But the moment he entered that office, he became a member of the swamp and broke his word on one major issue after another, from amnesty to ObamaCare.

Speaking of which, I was in that private meeting in 2013, senator, when we watched in horror as you refused to defund ObamaCare. This is just the tip of iceberg when it comes to Flake’s conservative offenses. It’s why today Flake is one of the most unpopular figures in Arizona. He’s also the second most unpopular senator in America, behind Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

The reason Flake is not running for re-election is not because he’s some anti-Trump knight in shining armor, as the media like to portray, but because voters don’t want him. He’s been thoroughly rejected. Flake continues to turn his back on conservatives, and so now they have turned their backs on him.

No need to be intellectually honest, either. I believe Sen. Jeff Flake is an intellectual fraud. He stole the title of Arizona Republican Sen. and 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative” – the best-selling polemic in history – and attempted to make it his own, for his own book. Full disclosure – something about which Flake is unfamiliar – my father wrote that book and would be appalled by Flake’s usurpation.

Flake is a man whose entire career at this point seems to be working overtime to curry favor with the national press corps that despises the president. If it were anyone else comparing the president of the United States to one of the most murderous dictators of the 20th century, he would be censured on the Senate floor. One suspects they’d rather just have him leave.

But since it’s a Republican senator who constantly attacks a Republican president, Flake will stay in demand with the national media, which will give him the attention he so desperately seeks.

And one more thing. It is considered the height of personal offense for anyone to compare someone to Adolf Hitler, who massacred 6 million Jewish men, women and children and was responsible for millions of other deaths in World War II.

Under Stalin “about 20 million died in labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions” the New York Times reported in 1989, giving an estimate by historian Roy Medvedev. The article went on to state: “In all, Mr. Medvedev calculated about 40 million victims of Stalin’s repressions, including those arrested, driven from their land or blacklisted.”