Many people have tried defining Donald Trump, our president once again, as an autocrat or a king wannabe. I say he is also like Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, who plunged the country into 10 years of violent and disastrous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Mao launched the Cultural Revolution because he believed capitalists and reactionaries hidden within the Communist Party wanted to move China away from socialism. He started by targeting arts and literature that he deemed critical of the Communist Party. Soon, of course, the movement consumed everything and everybody in China.
Trump and Mao are similar, although opposite, as Mao wanted China to be firmly socialist, whereas Trump wants to “Make America Great Again.” If Trump brings chaos, as Nikki Haley said, Mao liked the Chinese saying, “Great disorder under the heavens leads to great order.”
Mao had contempt for experts or specialists, seeing them as not red or revolutionary enough, if not counter-revolutionary. For instance, Mao named a village leader and a textile worker as vice premiers because they were Mao loyalists as well as exemplary workers.
Similarly, Trump named a news anchor and former infantry officer his secretary of defense; a vaccine skeptic and former environmental lawyer his secretary of health; and a podcaster and former cop his deputy director of the FBI – not because of their expertise or experience, but because of their loyalty.
Mao told his people that one had to smash everything to build anything new. He dismantled every level of China’s government, removing governors and mayors labeled “capitalist roaders,” and installed revolutionary committees composed of workers, peasants, soldiers, women and ethnic minorities.
Trump has vowed from his first term to “drain the swamp” and now is doing it by firing military generals, inspector generals and thousands of staff from 17 federal agencies, and working to shut down the Department of Education, Agency for International Development, and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Chairman Mao attacked not only capitalists but also Chinese traditions, as he called on his people to get rid of old culture, old thoughts, old habits, and old customs (including traditional holidays, worships, superstition, operas, etc.) and establish new and revolutionary culture, from textbooks to ballets.
Trump is trying to rid America of liberal culture, including policies and practices of DEI, critical race theory, gender ideology, globalism, etc., and replace them with “common sense,” “merit” and “America First.”
Mao notoriously used as his shock brigades the Red Guards, composed mostly of high school and college students, to take power from local governments and rough up people considered counterrevolutionaries.
Now Trump is also happily using and praising the very smart twenty-somethings of DOGE, headed by his chainsaw-brandishing special employee Elon Musk, as they go around firing people, cutting programs, and upending lives across the country.
Mao became a cult if not a god, omnipresent and omnipotent. Officials had to start speeches by quoting Mao. Everybody had to wear a Mao button and carry with them a copy of the Little Red Book of Mao quotes. No one dared to disobey.
Now, Trump also enjoys a cult-like following, fed by his two election wins and two assassination attempts. His Republican supporters, especially his cabinet members, often start interviews with “under President Trump’s great leadership,” “only with President Trump,” and so on. JD Vance even helped derail the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting by criticizing the Ukrainian president for not thanking President Trump. If Republicans disagree with Trump, they stay quiet out of fear of retribution.
The greatest shock Mao gave China and the world was inviting President Nixon to Beijing, a move described as ice-breaking and earth-shattering. The Chinese people couldn’t believe their eyes: their most-loved or feared Communist Party leader and helmsman shaking hands with the most-hated imperialist, America’s biggest anti-Communist red-baiter!
Trump shocked the world by talking peace with Putin, America’s and NATO’s greatest adversary, while pressuring Ukraine, the victim of Russian aggression, to enter a mineral business deal to repay U.S. aid.
So, was Mao betraying China’s socialist revolution by normalizing diplomatic relations with the United States? Is Trump betraying American and Western democracy and Ukraine by siding with Putin? Or, as some speculate, is Trump doing a reverse Nixon, aligning with Russia against China instead of aligning with China against the Soviets?
Stay tuned.
Thank you! I’ve been seeing this analogy since this administration started its destructive governance pattern: A very small cadre at the top engages a smallish number of committed followers to wreck the government and instill fear in the population, to increase the cadre’s power over both with hard-to-predict policies and a cult of personality. Key differences, I think, are that Mao’s policies, however misguided, were based on serious long-term strategic thinking rather than short-term advantages and simple reactions, and Mao’s cult of personality was much more deeply rooted. . . . what a comparison to have to make!
Mao’s purge of teachers, scientists, doctors, and technocratic administrators set back CHina’s development for decades, and interrupted the education of a generation of young men and women. The cost was uncountable.
Trump’s erratic decision-making and narcissistic, vengeful personality makes the comparison with Mao questionable, but his use of Elon Musk’s DOGE cowboy-coder kidz supercharging the national populist extreme Right agenda (exemplified in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025”) certainly reminds me of the Red Guards.
The only thing missing is the physical violence by the mob against the despised members of “the elite.” So far, anyway.
There is a straight line that runs from French Revolution Jacobins to Soviet Bolsheviks to Mao’s Red Guard to ActBlue incendiaries. ActBlue’s shock troops are definitely the foot soldiers for leftist-globalist-progressive causes.
Wendy Liu’s ‘compare and contrast’ essay is a non sequitur (Latin for “it does not follow”), that is, it is a series of statements that have no relation to the predicate statements.
It’s an interesting notion, but to me, resemblances are superficial at best. Mao’s China was a shambles, and whatever his personal character may have been and whatever the flaws of his policies, it was at least partly about a vision for China.
It’s kind of the opposite, here. Trump is the anti-state – the culmination of generations of a sort of reflexive opposition from a society that sort of wants to die. The only “great order” anyone here has in mind, is the Christian nationalist fantasy, and Trump doesn’t care in the least about that as long as it doesn’t ride him too hard.
Mao could talk to Nixon about relations that would bring significant benefits, to China anyway. Trump talks to Putin about making a deal that will give Trump some basis for saying he ended the war. What the practical outcome will be, he doesn’t give a damn. I’m not a student of the affairs of Venezuela, but that’s the kind of place I’d look for a parallel to Trump. As awful as the Mao years were for China, it wasn’t a simple case of “failed state.”
Some personal characteristics that don’t relate directly to politics:
A big difference: Mao had very little formal education, but was well-read and well-informed, and a pretty good poet. Trump went to an Ivy League college, but reads nothing and is ill-informed, and probably would not recognize a poem if he saw one.
A similarity: People who had/have personal interactions with them report that they could both be charming, even beguiling, when it suited their manipulative interests. According to his physician Li Zhisui, Mao could charm the fish from the sea.
Another similarity: They were both very tall for their populations, and both got fat as they got older.
Still another similarity: Both had pronounced local accents when trying to speak their country’s standard language. Mao more than Trump. And they were/are both very poor public speakers. I’ve watched some clips of Mao online, fumbling with papers in his hand just as Trump struggles to read the TelePrompTer.
A difference: Mao had four wives, Trump only three.
For all the murderous, disruptive and economically disastrous consequences of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Mao remains an esteemed person to many Chinese–from immense portraits in public spaces to small pictures and tiny statues in homes. From my political perspective, I hope a declining Trump reputation doesn’t have that long a tail.