MAGA Maoism

Trump’s economic vision relies on arbitrary use of tariffs which includes a harsh tradeoff: that Americans will accept short-term personal sacrifice — higher prices, fewer options, slimmer profits — to bring back manufacturing jobs but robots will take those jobs.

“This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here and your grandkids work here,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC.

Trump is breaking from conservative free-market orthodoxy, blending anti-capitalism with a top-down, centralized agenda for American economy.  Trump said he’ll personally pressure CEOs who make business decisions — such as advertising price increases from tariffs — that he determines is “wrong” or “hurtful to the country.”  Secretary Bessent suggested that fired federal workers could help supply “the labor we need for new manufacturing” — drawing comparisons to Mao’s policy of relocating urban elites to rural areas for “re-education.”

James Surowiecki, argued that Trumpism is “becoming perversely, farcically Maoist.”

Critics on the left and right warn of an emerging “MAGA Maoism” — a movement that demands loyalty to Trump as ideological purity, and embraces state power as a means to reshape society.  Trump’s strongman instincts have intensified the comparison to China’s revolutionary dictator.

“MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right,” former congressional speechwriter Rotimi Adeoye wrote for The Washington Post last month.

Drew Pavlou, an Australian anti-communism activist, wrote on Substack that “the entire world is now held hostage to Trump and his primitive, strangely Maoist worldview.” Trump seeks retribution against the media, law firms, NGOs, and political opponents. Some Chinese see echoes of the Cultural Revolution, when nearly all of society’s institutions were destroyed.

Trump’s bizarre and televised Cabinet meetings always begin with his secretaries showering him in praise casting the president as the “Dear Leader”. Trump wants a mass purges of career officials deemed disloyal, including at the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community.

Trump and his top advisers sound like the Chinese Communist Party:

“We are a department store, and we set the price,” Trump told Time when asked about tariff rates. “I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price … and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it.”

“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more,” Trump mused last week when discussing potential supply shortages.