MAGA Maoism: Trumpism as a Third World Movement

[muriel_volestrangler]

Trump’s ‘’Liberation Day’’ was strikingly Maoist in both form and content. In the largest assertion of political sovereignty over international capital markets in modern human history, Trump undid over a century of international commerce and trade flows, taking America’s tariff rate back to levels last seen in the 1890s. New effective tariff rates surpassed levels last seen under the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs regime which helped deepen the Great Depression.
...
My argument that MAGA is best understood as a Third World Ideology rests on the following:

- The MAGA movement’s neo-Maoist personality cult
- Trump’s embrace of Juche economics
- The MAGA movement’s embrace of a cult of sacrifice and poverty
- The MAGA witch doctor/shamanist approach to public health
- The MAGA movement’s hatred and resentment towards the West
- The MAGA movement’s embrace of clientelism and patronage networks that look like Russia in the 1990s

Honestly, the right way to think about MAGA is through the lens of Maoism and other Third Worldist political movements and personality cults. It uniquely draws upon the dumbest, shittiest and most repulsive parts of each: Peron’s economic illiteracy; Mao’s ideological wars on reality; Juche’s exaltation of economic pain and hardship in service of national self-reliance; Idi Amin’s ethnic expulsions of minority groups.
...
Trump’s grift and patronage networks resemble the kind of astonishingly blatant corruption we saw under the similarly senile Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, while his approach to public health probably most closely resembles South Africa under its HIV/AIDs denialist regime in the 2000s.

https://drewpavlou.substack.com/p/maga-maoism-trumpism-as-a-third-world

A great read, if quite long. There's even an excerpt for a Bob Woodward book of Trump scribbling on a speech draft "TRADE is BAD".

[Johonny]

1. Trump is a communist

He wants a centralized economy run by the state. Can you imagine a democratic president warning Tim Apple to make phones here or else?

This is the very thing moronic GOPers claimed was a democratic platform my whole life. Yet they love it and voted for it even as it harms the economy.

[usonian]

2. Orville Schell on MAGA-Mao Echoes

https://drewpavlou.substack.com/p/maga-maoism-trumpism-as-a-third-world

The Great Leap Backward.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Thanks - I'm guessing your link should be this:

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/maga-mao-echoes-with-orville-schell

or this

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/donald-trump-mao-zedong-cultural-revolution-parallels-by-orville-schell-2025-02

rather than the same as mine.

[usonian]

5. YES! Send more coffee.

I think I searched my computer for a saved article or searched Hacker News for it.
Life's a blur when you're having fun.
Would love to see Trump swim the Yangtze River.

Or, as money-grubbing duckduckgo.com advises me:

[Initech]

6. They step into Mao / North Korea territory on a daily basis.

Especially when they pull... whatever the fuck this is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WeirdGOP/comments/1jw0uu9/watching_convulsive_painting_of_trump_is_weird/

[newdeal2]

3. And yet, somehow supposedly intelligent and moderate Republicans

Are letting him do this to our country.

[Initech]

7. You'd think at some point someone would step in and put a stop to this.

But nope, they're just letting their bullshit fly freely while he usurps all the power. And of course the one person who attempted to put a stop to it, got fired and replaced with an ass kissing bootlicker.

[newdeal2]

8. Who was that person?

I’m drawing a blank. Too much crazy shit every day.

[Initech]

9. Liz Cheney got replaced with Harriet Hageman.

Who does nothing but kiss Trump's ass.