Far be it from us to suggest that the New York Times is publishing fake news, but what can one possibly make of the Gray Lady’s story this morning suggesting President Trump is like the communist dictator Joseph Stalin? The Times dasn’t come right out and say so. But it is running off its front page a story in respect of the president’s decision to make fun of the press by calling “fake news” an “enemy of the people.”

“The phrase was too toxic even for Nikita Khrushchev, a war-hardened veteran communist not known for squeamishness,” is how the Times starts its story, which is datelined Moscow. It says that as dictator (for which the Times substitutes the word “leader”) of Soviet Russia, Khrushchev “demanded an end to the use of the term ‘enemy of the people’ because ‘it eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight’.”

In other words, the Times is seeming to imply, Mr. Trump is worse than Krushchev. The chubby commissar denounced Stalin in a famous speech in 1956. The Times dredges up the fact that in that speech, Khrushchev told the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase “enemy of the people” was “specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals.” Watch out dissenters, Mr. Trump is going to annihilate you.

The Times admits it has no idea whether Mr. Trump is “aware of the historic resonance of the term.” It insists that the president’s decision to “unleash the terminology” has “left some historians scratching their heads.” Whether all this head-scratching started before the Times contacted these historians, we have no idea, but out of all the possible professors, guess which one the Times goes to right off the bat.

Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina. She turns out to be a professor at the New School at New York. She found Mr. Trump’s choice of words shocking in “a non-Soviet, moreover non-Stalinist setting.” She admits that her great-grandfather “of course also used Soviet slogans and ideological idioms” — you betcha — but insists he “tried to stay away from sweeping denunciations of whole segments of the Soviet population.”

The Times doesn’t say whether Professor Khrushcheva banged her shoe on the table to make her point (as Khrushchev once did at the United Nations). But the paper does raise the question of whether President Trump is going to roll out the guillotine. It notes that the phrase “enemy of the people” was first used during the French Revolution, during which it was codified and used during the Reign of Terror.

Of course the Times knows full well that Mr. Trump has no intention whatsoever of guillotining the American people. So it slyly introduces the idea by going to Professor Michael Orenstein of the University of Pennsylvania. He suggests that President Trump, by using such loaded terms as he does, renders them “meaningless.” Says he: “Nobody really thinks Mr. Trump will bring back the guillotine.”

If that’s the case, why is the Times devoting its page one to the story in the first place? Or going beyond Stalin and Robespierre to slime Mr. Trump with the Khmer Rouge’s mass killer, Pol Pot, and the Red Chinese thug Mao Tse-tung? It does this by turning to Philip Short, who suggests that the two tyrants “rarely if ever used ‘enemy of the people’ in domestic political struggles because it was an alien import.” He calls Mr. Trump’s use of the Red rhetoric “extraordinary.”

What is extraordinary, at least in our opinion, is the Times’ use against the president of this kind of preterition. That’s the rhetorical the trick of advancing an idea by denying it or by omission or indirection. The New York Sun’s “Reporter’s Handbook and Manual of Style” does not prohibit its writers from resorting to preterition. It does require them to “understand it and to use it only with premeditation, lest they casually tar an innocent figure.” Far be it from us to suggest the Times would do such a thing.