Trump’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ purges trigger alarming echoes of Mao

“There is great chaos under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

Nearly three weeks into the all-too-predictable nightmare that is the second coming of the Donald Trump regime, I have yet to read a better description of an authoritarian leader who is letting his allies dismantle entire federal agencies and waging a race-based culture war while threatening tariffs, invasions, and God knows what’s next.

Except here’s the crazy part: Those words were uttered some 59 years ago, back in 1966 when a then-20-year-old Trump was begging to get admitted to the University of Pennsylvania so he could try to hit on Candice Bergen. Actually, the speaker was the godfather of Chinese communism, Mao Zedong, seeking to describe his own second act that historians now know as a humanitarian disaster, the Cultural Revolution.

In one sense, it sounds a bit daft to even mention Trump — whose presidential campaigns starting in 2016 have centered his vows to get tough on China’s current rulers, and who frequently tries to brand his left-wing domestic enemies as “communists” — in even the same sentence as Mao, who ruled China mostly with an iron fist from his 1949 civil war victory until his death in 1976.

But the reality is that ideology mattered less over time to both rulers than protecting their strongman personalist regimes that came over time to depend on a devoted cult of true believers, often disconnected young men. I started thinking in particular about Mao’s violent, youth-led Cultural Revolution that launched in 1966 and targeted China’s then-class of academics, scientists, bureaucrats, and other professionals as I read the latest headlines from Trump 47.

In Trump’s new America, the practically Orwellian reversals of what’s right and wrong, and his MAGA movement’s modern, racism-based “cultural revolution” against what’s branded simply as “DEI” (for diversity, equity, and inclusion) have created bizarre scenarios that might only look familiar to the aging survivors of Mao’s 1960s purges.

This is especially true at the U.S. Education Department, the federal agency once closely tied to the American progress narrative of school desegregation. In recent years, as a movement called Black Lives Matter gained wide support, the department actively encouraged and paid for top staffers to attend diversity conferences, even during the first Trump term, when their boss was his acolyte, Betsy DeVos.

Now, at least 55 Education Department staffers who attended these DEI events have been placed on administrative leave by the new regime, which their union leaders see as nothing but a blatant effort to push these career public servants out of their jobs, as what was once an agency goal has instead been canceled as politically incorrect.

“I think it is shock and awe,” Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, told NBC News. “They’re trying to send us emails that make no sense and are super confusing to intimidate us or to make us run scared so we quit.”

The DOE moves are shocking — presumably much more so to the employees who’ve seen their lives turned upside down — but are part of a broader campaign against language, against ideas, and against long-standing notions about government and democracy, ripped partly from Mao’s Little Red Book and partly from George Orwell’s 1984.

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Consider the career employees at the National Science Foundation who, according to a report in the Washington Post, are actively combing through thousands of research papers that may be tainted, in the eyes of the new ruling regime, for their use of words such as trauma, barriers, equity, or excluded, as well as dozens of others. The results of the NSF searches could cancel major research — and maybe careers.

The Trump MAGA “newspeak” around race and gender has even led to moments like the National Football League rushing to ban the motto “End Racism” from the field at New Orleans’ Caesars Superdome ahead of Super Bowl LIX, apparently fearful of offending Dear Leader after Trump announced he’ll be attending the game in person. The move would almost be comical if it weren’t so, well, racist.

But the Trump 47 tendency to turn what was, as recently as last month, public virtue into a potential crime seems to be setting the stage for, at best, mass firings and, at worst, possible prosecutions and jailing of professionals who managed DEI programs, or agents or prosecutors who looked into Trump-related corruption. They seek a society in which thousands of decent citizens might be portrayed instead as criminals.

It reminded me all too much of a book I read recently about modern China and two sisters who, through almost a fluke, were separated when Mao came to power in 1949, with one in Taiwan while the other remained on the mainland. In Zhiqing Li’s nonfiction Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, the author’s Aunt Zhen, who remained under Communist rule, is a prominent OB-GYN and medical researcher whose world is turned upside down by the Cultural Revolution, harassed by young party apparatchiks, and finally separated from her family to work with peasant farmers in a remote village for a couple of years.

In the early days of Trump 47, I am watching experts who have been pillars of their communities become targets of suspicion, and wondering whether I was paranoid in seeing parallels to the launch of Mao’s massive purge. Certainly, America isn’t in the same place as China was in the second half of the 1960s, where the Cultural Revolution triggered civil unrest and war, persecution of intellectuals often forced into reeducation camps, and which ultimately may have caused the death of one million people or more.

But Howard W. French, a former New York Times foreign correspondent who has written about and traveled extensively in China, and now teaches at Columbia Journalism School, also sees eerie parallels, and he wrote about them in an essay for Foreign Policy that ran after Trump’s election but before his inauguration.

In his piece, French noted that — shades of Trump — the longtime Chinese Communist leader was on the outs in the first half of the 1960s and saw the Cultural Revolution both as a tool for reasserting power and also as a way to avenge his enemies within the government. For Mao, winning back his cultlike status as China’s strongman meant demolishing the administrative state, including institutions created under his watch. The initial slogan of the Cultural Revolution, “Bombard the Headquarters,” could easily have been borrowed by Trump’s 2024 campaign.

In addition to assaulting the bureaucracy, French wrote: “Revolutionaries reviled learning and respect for tradition. They targeted people with managerial competence and ravaged educational systems, and for years, the universities were all but closed. Radical upheaval was not the only tool for change. Another principle of the age was absolute loyalty to Mao. Those who survived these years in the high echelons of power did so through endless fawning. To question Mao’s wisdom was a shortcut to career termination, banishment, or death …”

I spoke with French this week to check back now that Trump is actually in office. He told me that the launch of his new regime — attacking key government offices like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the FBI, and the CIA, and cowing potential watchdogs in the media or the Democratic Party — has convinced him that the Mao comparison is both apt and concerning. “Trump’s essential agenda so far, as best I can understand it, is to do much like Mao attempted to do and that is to completely wipe out any effective organized means — institutional or otherwise — who might be limiting his authority,” he said.

None of this is to say the president and his MAGA loyalists are going to be shipping Drexel professors or Inquirer columnists to work on rural collective farms in Kansas, or that the far-right’s idea of an American cultural revolution is going to cause mass death. Not yet, anyway. But at the same time, if we ignore the flashing-red warning signs that look so much like the personalist dictators of yesteryear, we are making it harder to resist the worst possible outcomes.

Already, American universities, scientific research bodies, key government agencies, nonprofits, and other key pillars of a democratic society are under attack as never before. Just this week, we saw the first green shoots of a protest movement begin to sprout in state capitals and here in Philadelphia, and even some Democrats have begun the long process of growing a spine.

People who care about American liberty need to keep fighting a cultural counterrevolution, and we need to tell Trump what John Lennon might have told the president if he were still with us — that if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.

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