The Disturbing Rise of Trump and MAGA Maoism/Communism

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The Disturbing Rise of MAGA Maoism - The Atlantic
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By Derek ThompsonMay 8, 2025, 7 AM ET
Trump seems to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past.

Silhouette of Donald Trump, with Mao Zedong peeking out
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Saul Loeb / Getty; Zhao Liu / Getty.
China may well come to dominate the next century—because President Donald Trump is taking a page from the most famous Chinese leader of the previous one.

The United States remains the world’s preeminent soft power. It’s a financial and cultural juggernaut, whose entertainment and celebrities bestride the planet. But as an industrial power, the U.S. is not so much at risk of falling behind as it is objectively behind already. A recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs by Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell, both China experts who served in the Biden administration, made the case with alarming specificity. China makes 20 times more cement and 13 times more steel than the U.S. It makes more than two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, more than three-quarters of its electric batteries, 80 percent of its consumer drones, and 90 percent of its solar panels. China’s shipbuilding capacity is several orders of magnitude larger than America’s, and its navy will be 50 percent larger than the U.S. Navy by 2030.
The Trump administration clearly recognizes the need to rebuild industrial capacity. In its executive order published on “Liberation Day,” the White House suggested that, without high tariffs, America’s “defense-industrial base” is too “dependent on foreign adversaries”—a clear allusion to China.
But Trump’s approach to countering China has been so scattershot, so inept, so face-smackingly absurd, that it sometimes seems like covert policy to destroy America’s reputation. Rather than build a global trading and supply-chain alliance to match the scale of China, we’ve threatened to invade Canada and slapped new tariffs on our European and East Asian allies. Rather than invest in scientific discovery, which is the basis of our technological supremacy, the administration threatens to decimate the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation while attacking major research universities, including Harvard and Columbia. Rather than compete on clean energy, the White House has targeted solar and wind subsidies for destruction. Rather than invest in nuclear power by expanding the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which provides billion-dollar loan guarantees for nuclear projects, the administration dismissed 60 percent of its staff. Rather than secure our reputation as the world’s premier destination for global talent, we’re driving away foreign students.
“If you take every asymmetric American advantage”—our universities, our science, our reputation for attracting the world’s smartest young people—“we’re going after each of them in a fit of cultural Maoism,” Doshi told me last week. Mao Zedong, who led China’s one-party state after World War II, oversaw a fraught and fatal attempt to industrialize the country, known as the Great Leap Forward. His regime was infamous for its cult of personality and its purging of ideological enemies, not to mention millions of deaths from starvation.

Doshi does not think that Trump will starve millions of Americans to death (nor do I). But he does see Trump’s second term featuring a “cult of personality,” he told me, which may not quite be Maoist but does feel Mao-ish. The first 100 days of this administration were “defined by the relentless targeting of individuals and organizations for their heretical views and purges within the administration for those deemed insufficiently loyal. And its destination is the destruction of state capacity and leading institutions as fervor and zeal overwhelm any prudence and planning.”

Doshi isn’t the only one making this analogy. Several weeks ago, the writer Rotimi Adeoye identified what he called “MAGA Maoism” in The Washington Post. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he said, the Trumpist right seems obsessed with scrubbing any vestige of progressive thought from government libraries and government-funded museums. As The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has written, the White House has yanked books by Black, female, and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving Mein Kampf in place), accused the National Museum of African American History and Culture of spreading “improper ideology,” and urged the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad.
Another eerie echo of Mao has been MAGA’s glorification of strong men doing strong things and its dreams of sending the liberal elites to the factories and the fields to teach them a lesson. In a commencement address at the University of Alabama, Trump encouraged business majors “to apply your great skills that you’ve learned … to forging the steel and pouring the concrete of new American factories, plants, shipyards, and even cities.” As the journalist Michael Moynihan observed, this sounded curiously like Mao’s suggestion in 1957 that “the intellectuals”—including “writers, artists, teachers, and scientific-research workers”—should “seize every opportunity to get close to the workers and peasants,” even if it meant living in rural China for several years to work as “technicians in factories” or “technical personnel in agriculture.”
For years, both major parties have looked to China with envy. How can they make so much, so quickly, while we struggle to build sufficient housing in major cities—much less advanced electronics, computer chips, robots, and ships? Under Trump, China envy has taken a strange turn. Rather than compete, we seem to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past—casually gutting the government’s ability to support science and key technologies while hunting down wrongthink with the same ferocity that Trump supporters once despised among progressives.
In the past week, the Mao vibes have gotten especially weird. In the 1950s and ’60s, Mao demanded that ordinary Chinese families sacrifice for the general good—for example, by melting their kitchen utensils and other metallic items to increase national steel production. (This mostly produced a lot of useless pig iron.) Trump, for his part, has become fixated on new methods of economic sacrifice. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,” he said, in defense of his tariffs’ likely effect of obliterating the toy business. Going further, he told NBC that students “don’t need to have 250 pencils, they can have five.” Just over 100 days into this term, what the Trump supporter Bill Ackman called “the most pro-growth, pro-business administration” in modern history is defending the rationing of Elsa dolls and No. 2 pencils.
Trump’s administration is still young, and it has an uncanny ability to pack each week with a year’s worth of news. Optimistically, there are many more weeks for Trump’s economic and cultural policy to get better. Realistically, there is plenty of time for both to get worse. By driving away talented immigrants, by targeting our most successful universities, by torching our trading alliances, by dismantling our industrial policy, by slashing our scientific funding, and by hurting America’s reputation around the world at the precise moment that we need global scale to build a secure counterpart to China’s industrial dominance, Trump has responded to the threat of China by mimicking the ghost of its past.

When I asked the Foreign Affairs co-author Kurt Campbell for his assessment of Trump, he told me that he has had alarming conversations with analysts in China. “Some of them will candidly say, ‘You know, we had our timetables for how we might come at you … for how we might pull [you] away [from] your allies,’” Campbell said. “‘And what you’re doing in three or four months exceeds what we would have hoped to do in five or 10 years
 

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MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right
Summarize
A new conservative strain dreams of sending the bourgeoisie to work the factories.

April 8, 2025

(Washington Post illustration; iStock)
Rotimi Adeoye is a political writer and former congressional speechwriter to then-Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan).

On “Liberation Day” this past week, President Donald Trump announced a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods and far greater ones on individual countries. His administration framed it as a course correction to make America “competitive” again. But if you listened closely, especially to his supporters, this wasn’t just about trade. It was about work and the kinds of work that still count.

Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution.

What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”


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This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America’s factories with recently fired federal workers. It’s a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle.

This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to “learn to code” while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines.

What makes this iteration feel uniquely American is how aestheticized it has become. Online, there’s an industry of memes and male micro-celebrities fetishizing rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity that is less about economic reality and more about identity performance. Trump doesn’t need to build a single factory for that performance to succeed. He only needs to sell the image of one.

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There’s political danger to this approach. I expect it to land with a thud in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It’s the kind of suburb that didn’t promise luxury, but offered enough: tree-lined streets, solid schools, and the belief that hard work and good behavior would lead to a decent life.

For the children of immigrants — and for Pennsylvanians whose parents worked with their hands in factories or kitchens or on construction sites — the promise of white-collar stability carried real meaning. We were taught to reach for security, not power: get the degree, land the job, and trade our families’ physical strain for something quieter, safer and more lucrative.

Now, those aspirations are being rebranded as betrayal. The very things that once defined responsibility and success are recast by the new right as signs of softness and elitism. In communities like mine, where the American Dream was treated with reverence, the ground beneath it is starting to feel less like foundation and more like fiction.

The American Dream is not a hammer. It never was. But Trump understands something vital about the moment: People are tired of markets and tired of waiting for politicians to fix the affordability crisis. In many parts of the country — especially in Pennsylvania — communities were hollowed out by deindustrialization, abandoned by a bipartisan consensus that viewed globalization as destiny. Wages stagnated. Towns emptied. The labor that once brought pride became precarious, then obsolete. Voters want to believe in something real — even if it’s made of smoke. That is what his tariff strategy offers: not renewal, but revenge. And revenge sells.

But nostalgia is not a plan. It’s a mirror turned backward. Trump is not bringing back the dignity of work — he’s marketing the image of it. His tariffs won’t rebuild Bethlehem Steel. They won’t revive the coal towns. But they will make life more expensive for working people, while feeding the fantasy that somewhere out there, the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.
 
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This article is clever in how it skewers Trump's incoherent response to China, but it misses a huge, dangerous point, by ignoring that modern China is still an authoritarian state. And how its industrial rise isn't just about smart planning or production, but is underpinned by one-party dictatorial rule and swift crackdown on dissent. I'm sick of all these articles and commentary that ignores what kind of state it is, and why we should *not* treat it like an industrial model to envy. They're right that emulating China's past is bad. But romanticizing its present is worse.
 

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This article is clever in how it skewers Trump's incoherent response to China, but it misses a huge, dangerous point, by ignoring that modern China is still an authoritarian state. And how its industrial rise isn't just about smart planning or production, but is underpinned by one-party dictatorial rule and swift crackdown on dissent. I'm sick of all these articles and commentary that ignores what kind of state it is, and why we should *not* treat it like an industrial model to envy. They're right that emulating China's past is bad. But romanticizing its present is worse.
People are kinda tired of the nuance tho. The USA is missing on several key outcomes.
 

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Is America Facing a ‘Cultural Revolution’?
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What to make of the comparisons between Trump and Chairman Mao.

Howard W. FrenchMay 8, 2025, 6:04 PM
A propaganda poster depicts Chairman Mao inside the open top of a jeep reaching out toward an adoring crowd who wave red flags and hold little red books.

A Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda poster. David Pollack/Corbis via Getty Images
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump defiled one of the oldest and most sacrosanct pillars of the American project.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, he said that he simply wasn’t sure if non-U.S. citizens are protected by the right of due process under the country’s Fifth Amendment, as numerous Supreme Court rulings have guaranteed. When asked if he has to “uphold the Constitution,” Trump replied, “I don’t know.”
It is a measure of how steeply U.S. political culture has deteriorated during Trump’s mere 100-plus days in office that such an outrage can feel like ancient history less than a week later. That is not only because Americans are being assailed by breaks with precedent, tradition, or the law on a near-daily basis. They are also becoming numbed.

Each new spate of willfully provocative departures from the past has the effect of anesthesia, desensitizing the public to the outrages that preceded them. (Just two days before his comments on due process, Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated photo of himself as a pope in full regalia on social media.)
Since the NBC interview, Trump has told Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, that only “time will tell” whether the United States can annex its neighbor against its will; boasted that Washington has no need of other countries’ markets; and insisted baselessly that tariffs are saving the country money. Lesser instances of foolishness include a proposal to place a 100 percent tax on foreign movies and a nostalgic suggestion that the Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay be reopened.
After Trump’s reelection, as he tapped manifestly unqualified people to fill his cabinet, I warned in a column that his second term was setting the country up for nothing short of a cultural revolution like that of China. At the time, some readers found this extreme. Since the U.S. president took office, though, many others have drawn the same analogy, comparing the new Trump era with Mao Zedong’s final decade in power from 1966 to 1976. This period began with a bid to whip up protests against the state as a way to eliminate impediments to Mao’s personal power and quickly became devastating—and deadly—in its chaos.
Those most skeptical of calling the present moment a cultural revolution have shared with me their disbelief that the United States could be on the path toward a violent civil war—or that Trump and his most zealous supporters would openly encourage armed attacks on their critics, as Mao’s close underlings in the so-called Gang of Four did.

I find more insurrectionist tactics by Trump hard to rule out after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But predicting a U.S. civil war was never the main point in drawing this parallel. The idea was that the new administration is waging a broad and energetic—though it often seems haphazard—campaign to dismantle the U.S. system: the constitutional limits on executive power, the essential place of civil society, and even freedoms of the press and expression. Today, who but the most committed Trump partisans seriously doubt this?

As Trump’s second term unfolds, however, it is the contrasts rather than the similarities that have grown sharper between the United States’ experience of his power—with his innate disorganization, willful mischief, vindictiveness, and groundless self-certainty—and China’s suffering under Mao.

The U.S. and Chinese systems were, of course, fundamentally different from the start. The United States is, by law, an electoral democracy; China, by its own design and acknowledgment, is an authoritarian dictatorship led by the Chinese Communist Party.

One of the most remarkable things about China’s experience during the Cultural Revolution, though, is how quickly its vaunted centralized authority crumbled. Although many millions of Chinese people exalted Mao like a demigod, even he was rendered nearly powerless to control what he had unleashed.

When I asked Andrew Walder, a professor of sociology at Stanford University and expert on the Cultural Revolution, about whether we should compare that period with the present-day United States, he responded in an email: “There was remarkably little resistance to the unfolding CR in 1966—’67. In fact, the state structure collapsed from within, as rank and file bureaucrats overthrew their bosses.”

In a phone conversation that followed, Walder added that what distinguishes the United States is that “we have the most advanced 18th-century design for a political system in the world. The founders put sand in the gears of the system at every level, and this has been very effective [in preventing unchecked presidential power].”

Recent weeks have shown many signs of this. Maine Gov. Janet Mills defied Trump over policies on transgender athletes and successfully pushed back against his administration’s vindictive efforts to cut funding to education in her state. A federal judge recently barred Trump from punishing a big law firm for representing people and causes he opposes. Even conservative judges have issued decisions condemning Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants.
By itself, the U.S. judiciary will not be enough to prevent Trump from wreaking devastating and fundamental damage on the country’s political system. After all, he still has most of his term ahead of him and hardly seems chastened.

I may not be as optimistic about the resilience of the country’s democracy as Walder seems to be, but I am also not so utterly pessimistic as to believe that all will fall apart in the United States, as happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.

To say that much depends on the Republican Party is not to indulge in partisanship. It is an objective fact that very few Republicans in Congress—or indeed in the party itself—have shown much inclination to defend the long-standing political norms that have come under attack by Trump, much less criticize him directly.

Without a Congress willing to play a vigorous role in checking presidential power, over time, the courts will likely be too weak to defend Washington’s constitutional system and the democratic rule that it enables.

Many Americans hold out hope that Democratic Party successes in the 2026 midterm elections may effectively rein in Trump. This is not a foregone conclusion, though. As with all elections, results cannot be guaranteed. And given Trump’s dishonest claims about past elections, even the darkest scenarios are hard to rule out. Will there be elections at all? If so, will they be free and fair? Would Trump, who has shown an inclination to disregard the courts, respect the will of an opposition-led Congress? Americans are unaccustomed to such fundamental doubts about their system, but they would be wise to consider them.

Still, Walder was right about sand in the gears being part of the Founding Fathers’ design. This can be felt in the working of states, which retain considerable autonomy and can summon resources of their own to defend democratic life and resist despotic urges from the White House.

The ultimate rampart, though, may be public opinion. This is something that was less important in Maoist China or even the China of today, because the state tightly controls information and offers the public little opportunity to openly second-guess official policies. According to opinion polling, Trump currently has the lowest popular support of any U.S. leader in the past 80 years—and approval ratings tend to go down, not up, after the honeymoon period that follows inaugurations.
It will ultimately be for the American people to decide how much they cherish the democracy they have built over generations. And as disturbing as it is to see that roughly 40 percent of the population still supports Trump despite his repeated disregard for the system designed by the country’s founders, that figure suggests that an even larger number of Americans still care enough about its preservation to insist on it.
 

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