Understanding Trump as Mao
Parallels between Trump and Mao offer insights into the peril facing America. Differences in the societies they set out to destroy point to strengths that may yet save America.
Critics of the Trump regime often cite parallels between Trumpism and early Nazism. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century; Elon Musk’s Nazi salute; Trump’s bromance with Putin, and J.D. Vance’s support for Germany’s hard-right AfD; among many other things, have led people fighting to protect U.S. democracy to see Trump and his acolytes as fascists.
This analogy isn’t wrong. The merger of political and corporate power at the heart of the Trump regime is a hallmark of fascism. But as a former foreign correspondent who reported on China’s recovery from the Cultural Revolution, I see a different parallel: obvious differences aside, Donald Trump and Mao Zedong are strikingly similar.
MAGA Hats and Mao Caps
The similarities range from the trivial to the profound. Both Trump and Mao reached the pinnacle of their power as fat old men, physically imposing but far from fit. Trump picked red as the color of his movement, tapping a deep cultural affinity. So did Mao. Trumpies, like Maoists, have distinctive headgear: MAGA hats and Mao caps. Trump is a sociopath, incapable of empathy. Ditto Mao.
After the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) Mao was sidelined by technocratic leaders, notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who put China on a path towards economic development. Angry and restive, Mao regained power by launching the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, a violent convulsion that persecuted millions of people, mostly educated urbanites, driving many to suicide.
Trump, too, was pushed from power after a disastrous term, including a bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in 400,000 American deaths, only to return with vengeance and knowledge of the levers of power. Trump purges are just beginning but already thousands of dedicated civil servants fired after years of service are suffering anxiety and depression, and a handful have reportedly taken their lives.
Both leaders delight in smashing government agencies and overturning societal and political norms. Trump says he is destroying the “deep state” to “Make America Great Again,” when his real goals, like Mao’s, are to consolidate power and punish his enemies, real and imagined.
“Better Red than Expert!”
Like Trump, Mao had supreme confidence in his own intellectual superiority and disdain for the views of others. Mao was profoundly anti-intellectual, shutting universities and research institutes. Sound familiar? The Cultural Revolution slogan “Better Red than Expert!” could easily be a MAGA slogan, as the Trump regime guts government agencies and shuts down climate and medical research, replacing fired experts with Trump loyalists.
Both regimes disdain cities, especially their national capital, while extolling supposedly homespun values of rural people. Mao exiled millions of urban youth to the countryside to “learn from the people.” Trump has pledged to ship up to 100,000 federal jobs outside of Washington, giving agencies an April 14 deadline to submit plans.
Sinologist Orville Schell has noted some of these similarities, while adding Freudian analysis: both Mao and Trump, he writes, had difficult relationships with unloving fathers. Mao’s childhood experience “drew him to the oppositional politics that helped catalyze the chaos and disorder that engulfed China for decades,” Schell wrote in a recent commentary. “Trump, too, had a bullying father who repeatedly told his sons that they would succeed in being ‘kings’ only by being ‘killers,’ he adds.
New York Times columnist Li Yuan reported that many Chinese see striking parallels between Trump and Mao. For example, Elon Musk’s tech bros remind Chinese of Mao’s teenage Red Guards. Deng Haiyan, a Chinese commentator quoted in Yahoo News, wrote that the U.S. embassy in China now praises Trump “every day, in every article,” much like Chinese embassies praised Mao daily at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
Like Mao, Trump seeks to control culture. Mao and his wife, former actress Jiang Qing, dictated what forms of cultural expression were permitted and suppressed others. Trump has fired the leadership of The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and made himself chair, while ordering government departments and schools to expunge books and other content related to “Woke Ideology.”
Impact of Cultural Revolution Lasting and Profound
The impact of the Cultural Revolution was lasting and profound. Historians mark the end of upheaval as 1976, the year Mao died. By then China was weak and its people impoverished. When I first visited China in 1979, it was a cold, grey and dirty place. Food and other essentials were rationed. Everybody wore Mao suits. There was no nightlife and any restaurant larger than a noodle stand was state-run.
China was internationally isolated, having cultural and economic ties with only a handful of remnant Stalinist countries, notably tiny Albania. Propaganda slogans insisted that the opposite was true, boasting plaintively: “We have friends all over the world!”
From 1979 onward, China recovered under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his successors who proclaimed the slogan Gaige, Kaifang, “Reform and Opening,” allowing greater freedom and engagement with the outside world. Rapid growth lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty, transforming China into an industrial and technological behemoth.
Impact of MAGA? Too Soon to Say
It is too early to know the impact of Trump’s destruction of the U.S. government and society. Already America is well on its way to becoming an international pariah. There is no shortage of dystopian scenarios, including climate catastrophes, a global depression, and the collapse of American democracy. None of these dire outcomes can be ruled out.
Yet, as Timothy Snyder teaches us, American democracy is in peril but not yet dead. Fundamental differences between China and the United States give hope that Trumpism’s sway in the United States will be shorter lived than Maoism’s sway in China.
While China is a one-party authoritarian state, the United States remains a democracy, however flawed. We are also a federal republic, with each state electing its governor and legislature. Despite gerrymandering and voter suppression, half of Americans live in states that will try to resist the Trump onslaught.
We also have deeply ingrained traditions of free speech and civil resistance. Despite Fox News, Jeff Bezos’ craven capitulation as owner of The Washington Post, and accommodationist stances at other legacy media, we still have brave opinion journals like The New Republic and The Nation and plenty of feisty, independent online media. Social media, too, is showing signs of resilience, as people flee Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s non-fact-checking Facebook and Instagram for BlueSky.
Daily demonstrations in Washington DC, angry citizens showing up at townhall meetings, and growing weekly protests against Elon Musk at Tesla dealerships — all these and more suggest that Americans are waking up and preparing to fight for American democracy.
Thinking of Trump as a wanna-be Mao can help us to make sense of the chaos that he and Musk are unleashing on America and the world.
But Chinese society and American society are very different. We can’t rely on the courts or the media, or even the Democratic Party, to save us. In the end, ordinary Americans who refuse to go along and get along will make the difference.
