As liberal critics of the Trump presidency have scrambled for traction since January, one historical analogy seems ubiquitous: “If you want a model for what’s happening to America,” economist Paul Krugman wrote in April, “think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” From the New York Times to the Guardian to a slew of Substacks, commentators have presented Donald Trump as the U.S. incarnation of the Great Helmsman.
Like Mao Zedong, these pundits say, Trump is mobilizing an insurrectionary base to destroy bureaucratic and cultural elites, has created a cult of personality in which the leader’s will overrides all else, and is brutally intolerant of his ideological enemies.
How robust is this comparison, though? Are Department of Government Efficiency interns really the Red Guards reborn? A brief historical recap may be helpful. The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution traumatized almost every school, university, and workplace in China. Mao mobilized millions of Chinese people to smash rivals whom he deemed counter-revolutionary. Rule by one man ousted rule by law or by party.
In the campaign’s earliest, most radical phase, between 1966 and 1969, a series of violent power seizures by students and workers swept away political institutions at almost all levels of society. Red Guards—mostly school and university students thoroughly indoctrinated in the Mao cult—terrorized and sometimes imprisoned and murdered intellectuals and anyone perceived as tainted by European or American culture. The country teetered on the brink of full-blown civil war, scarred by mass killings (the campaign’s total death toll may have approached 2 million) and even cannibalism as revenge against “class enemies.”
The second Trump presidency and the Cultural Revolution present a few superficial likenesses: the veneration of the leader at the head of a movement, the attacks on state and nonstate institutions (bureaucrats, the media, universities), the framing of political battles as culture wars. Both Mao and Trump fashioned themselves as outsiders with a love of insurgent chaos.
But the points of divergence are more compelling. China in the 1960s (a young Leninist dictatorship reeling from civil wars and political campaigns) was a vastly different society from the contemporary United States. The Cultural Revolution flooded Chinese society with horrifying levels of brutality, from the central leadership to the grassroots peripheries, which the United States has so far been spared.
Even allowing for the Supreme Court’s decision last year on presidential immunity, the United States still has a functioning (if strained) legal system that has frequently blocked Trump’s actions. This scarcely resembles the rule by emotions by which Mao removed any constraint on his commands.
Foreign policy presents another crucial point of difference. Mao was ideologically expansionist, aspiring to win China, rather than the Soviet Union, leadership of the world revolution. Trump, by contrast, promises to make America great again by reducing U.S. commitments overseas. Mao hoped the Cultural Revolution would reenergize and then export communism to those struggling against colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and even to the cafes, universities, and factories of Western Europe and the United States.
Trump has rushed to dismantle the Pax Americana prevailing since the end of World War II and has renounced the rules-based global order that his predecessors created and defended. “America First” points in a very different direction from the global Maoism platformed by the Cultural Revolution.
So, why have so many commentators turned to this analogy? At its most basic level, the Cultural Revolution supplements an earlier wave of liberal commentary that posited European fascism as the model for Trumpism’s rise. The analogy’s proponents offer both a wake-up call and a crumb of comfort. Clearly, this is a moment of crisis, they concede, but what could be more un-American than the Cultural Revolution? In establishing Trump as the apostle of Chairman Mao, he can be unmasked as a fundamentally alien threat to American life.
A number of China-specialist reporters have presented the Cultural Revolution analogy as emerging directly from Chinese people—a warning made more authentic because it comes from close to the source of that disaster. But for the most part, it has been Western commentators who have sounded the alarm about Maoism in America. In doing so, perhaps unwittingly, they have written the latest chapter in a long history of making China the source of U.S. ills. The first major population targeted for sweeping federal immigration restriction in the 1880s was the Chinese; a suspicion of Chinese influence permeated the United States and its allies during the Cold War. This fear has reemerged in U.S. politics and culture with considerable force in the 2010s and 2020s.
Anxieties about China’s potential to eclipse the U.S.-led world order have manifested among liberal policymakers and commentators for more than a decade. Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia, intended to curb Chinese influence, was revived and intensified by Joe Biden, who also maintained both the tariffs and the hostile rhetoric of the first Trump administration. The notion that the United States might be not only outpaced by Communist China but also condemned to replay its most devastating catastrophe makes the Cultural Revolution analogy horrifying and irresistible in equal measure.
But the fact remains that the most convincing historical analogies and roots of the second Trump presidency remain domestic. From the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, the legal framework for Trump’s war on immigrants has not yet required a single new piece of legislation. His blanket use of executive orders builds on a tradition established by his predecessors in the White House and responds to an increasingly dysfunctional legislative system that no U.S. leader has fully addressed, let alone tried to fix.
Nativism has deep roots in U.S. history, and Trump’s signature cry of “America First” recapitulates the Nazi-sympathetic rhetoric of the interwar period. The Cultural Revolution may helpfully jolt us into seeing what makes Trumpism distinctive rather than familiar. But if we ignore the local roots of the MAGA moment in search of a foreign analogy, it becomes harder to see both the dangers and the potential remedies of the current crisis.
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