Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said there isn’t “any comparison” between President Donald Trump and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during an interview late Tuesday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” the day before Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) reportedly plans to do just that in the Senate.

Flake, an avowed Never-Trumper and critic of the president’s, told NBC Sunday that he planned to compare Trump’s criticism of the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people” with Stalin’s use of the same term during a speech Wednesday. But Rubio denounced his GOP colleague’s plan to tie Trump to Stalin as an inappropriate “exaggeration.”

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“I don’t think there’s any comparison — not just between this president, but between any American public figure with Joseph Stalin,” Rubio said. “But again, I don’t know if that’s what [Flake’s] going to say in his speech. He hasn’t given it yet.”

Rubio said he doesn’t “agree with everything the president does,” and speculated that Fox News host Laura Ingraham doesn’t “agree with everything the president does,” either.

“But one of the things that is happening is exaggeration. Just like the president does things from time to time that I don’t agree with or I would have done differently, I think the reaction to it is often very exaggerated,” Rubio said.

Flake plans to tell his Senate colleagues that “when a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him ‘fake news,’ it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press,” according to excerpts obtained by NBC News.

“Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,” Flake plans to say.

Trump referred to the “FAKE NEWS media” as “the enemy of the American People” in a February tweet while calling out specific outlets.

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Flake became a mainstream media favorite after passionately denouncing Trump during an October 2017 Senate speech in which he said he wouldn’t run for re-election in 2018. Flake also has refused to rule out a potential 2020 presidential bid against Trump.

During his interview on “The Ingraham Angle,” Rubio also touted the new Senate bill he backed along with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to punish foreign nations attempting to interfere with U.S. elections. If passed, the bill also would require the director of national intelligence to announce one month after every federal election whether or not a foreign nation interfered in the process.

Related: Peevish Jeff Flake Won’t Rule Out 2020 Presidential Bid Against Trump

“So there’s clearly a Russia element to it because there’s no doubt the Russians tried to interfere in our election,” Rubio said, pointing to the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Although mainstream media outlets and liberals emphasize Russia’s 2016 interference and whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians against Clinton, Rubio warned that the U.S. faces a far greater threat than Russia when it comes to potential electoral interference.

“The biggest threat to America’s electoral system — and quite frankly America at large — is not Russia. It’s China,” Rubio said. “It’s China — it’s basically infiltrated its way into all of our technologies across the supply chain. They make anything the Russians can do look like child’s play.”

“And that includes stealing secrets, that includes influencing individuals in American government through a lot of different methods. And that includes potentially interfering in an election,” Rubio said of China’s threat to the U.S. “So I think the biggest threat moving forward is not the Russians — it’s actually the Chinese … and that’s one of the things I thought about when getting involved in this legislation.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.