relatively silent since Trump’s return to the White House – but that doesn’t mean he is any less vexed by what it portends. Nor could he have been reassured by Trump’s brazen response to a question last October about what he would do if Xi blockaded Taiwan: “Xi knows I’m fucking crazy!”
The Senate Majority Whip, John Barrasso, put it more decorously: “President Trump clearly ran for office to be a disrupter, and he’s going to continue to do that.” He is not wrong. In the first ten days of his second administration, Trump signed more than 50 executive orders; offered all federal workers a buyout; attempted to freeze funding that had already been allocated by Congress; threatened tariffs against numerous countries; and rattled allies with endless other insulting diktats.
But there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection….
Mao’s abiding belief in the power of resistance led him to celebrate conflict. “Without destruction, there can be no construction” (不破不立), he proclaimed. Another vaunted slogan of the time declared: “World in great disorder: excellent situation!” (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or “overturn” (翻身) China’s class structure proved massively destructive. But Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of “making revolution” (搞革命革命) and building a “New China.”
The Trump administration has an equally voracious appetite for disruption and chaos. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is also a Trump acolyte, recently described the new president’s overhaul of the United States government as a “revolution” in which “some people will get their heads cut off.” And this revolution’s executioner-in-chief would appear to be the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.
Despite obvious differences, Musk is more than a little reminiscent of Kuai Dafu, who was deputized by Mao himself to lead Tsinghua University’s Red Guard movement. Kuai not only brought chaos to his campus, but led 5,000 fellow Red Guards into Tiananmen Square shouting slogans against Liu and Deng, before attempting to lay siege to the nearby leadership compound, Zhongnanhai – much as Trump’s own version of the Red Guards did at the US Capitol in 2021….
Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.
Lovely. America's very own Cultural Revolution currently kicking off. With Make America Great Again perhaps as the new Great Leap Forward? Though I doubt even Trump could aspire to Mao's 30 to 40 million or so deaths. Still, early days…
