Donald Trump, Vladimir Lenin and Vladimir Leneen
He invented a new name for Vladimir Lenin.
Well, not a new name as such but, apparently a new pronunciation. In elevating the quote on social media, a supporter of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) focused on the embrace of Lenin rather than Trump’s odd pronunciation.
Trump quotes Vladimir Lenin, a Communist tyrant, while continuing to deny outcome of 2020 election pic.twitter.com/kV5fDh5NVl
— Based Barry (@BasedBarryFan) April 27, 2023
A quick style note: For the rest of this article, words in italics indicate an alternative pronunciation of Lenin. The typical American pronunciation, then, would be: Lennon. Then there’s Trump’s version.
“You know Leneen — did anyone ever hear of Leneen?” Trump said in New Hampshire. “He said, the vote counter is far more important than the candidate. Has anyone ever heard that — Lennon. Leneen, as they say, as they say in Russia.”
Leneen! Truly an out-of-left-field entry in the canon.
As it turns out, Thursday’s iteration wasn’t the first of this particular riff. At a campaign rally for Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz in September, he said much the same thing — with a twist.
“Did you ever hear the statement by, I believe it was Leneen. Did anyone ever hear of Leneen?” Trump said then. “People would say it with less sophistication: Lennon. Leneen! I like the way they say that.”
So the question is, then: Who’s they? Who says it that way?
Being curious, I did what any modern American would do. I went to a website focused on the pronunciation of names and typed in “Lenin.” The result:
Score one for Lennon.
But who’s to say this is reliable? About a decade ago, a YouTube account that made up fake pronunciations went relatively viral, given the period. For example:
Was I simply falling victim to some internet pranksters, like a non-sophisticate?
My next stop, then, was to suss out the pronunciation offered by Lenin’s most recent successor, Russian President Vladimir Putin. I don’t have his cellphone number, which is probably for the best, but he likes to drape his rhetoric about, say, invading foreign countries in historical garb. So finding a video of him talking about Lenin was like shooting down Su-25s over Donetsk.
At the outset of the renewed invasion of Ukraine last year, Putin addressed his nation. He blamed Lenin and his allies for “severing what is historically Russian land” — Ukraine. And he pronounced the name Leenin.
That’s how the woman who answered the phone at London’s Russian Language Centre pronounced it, too: Leenin. A native Russian speaker who didn’t give her name, she noted that the letter at the start of Lenin’s last name is a “soft L.” It’s a bit like the ñ in Spanish, a sort of L-Y combination. Leeyenin, maybe? Either way, it isn’t Leneen.
Since we’re on the subject, I’ll point out that the quote about vote-counters likely originates much closer to home for Trump. The website Quote Investigators, which does what it says on the tin, identifies the first reference to elections being decided by vote-counters to a political cartoon from 1871 in a New York City newspaper. Omnipotent political boss William Tweed is pictured next to a ballot box, the text beneath him reading, “As long as I count the Votes, what are you going to do about it?”
The site includes a number of other iterations of the same sort of comments over the following decades, before Lenin rose to power. It’s attributed to a politician in California, to Napoleon Bonaparte, to an unnamed political figure from South America. It’s likely, really, that the saying predates all of those, but our ability to track its use is limited by access to historical material.
That Quote Investigators article, like other assessments of the “vote-counters” thing, also introduces one additional wrinkle. The quote is usually misattributed not to Lenin but to Joseph Stalin.
Or as sophisticated Russians say: Joseph Staleen.
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