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In 1966, Chinese leader Mao Zedong engineered a decisive return to power after seven years of quiet retreat following the first period of his near-absolute rule, which ended with one of the worst famines in history.
First, Mao incited a kind of culture war: He manipulated what had begun as an obscure debate about a theater play into a vehicle to attack bourgeois influences in the Chinese Communist Party and the officials that he believed were plotting his demise. Mao’s next move involved inciting university students in the capital of Beijing to attack the country’s establishment and nomenklatura as traitors and counterrevolutionaries.
Mao’s imprimatur was enough to unleash a frenzy. From those first protests, a slogan was born that eerily captured the spirit of much of China’s next decade, known as the Cultural Revolution. “Bombard the headquarters,” the saying went, and following that watchword, China spiraled into deep chaos as rampaging young people set about attacking figures of authority and institutions of government, leading to the deaths of around 1 million people.
As a reporter in China in the early 2000s, I interviewed Nie Yuanzi, the former university administrator whose radical wall poster is often credited for setting off the movement. At 84 years old, Nie was full of regret. “I didn’t know we were heading toward disaster,” she told me. “Once I understood, I stopped following them. I opposed them.”
Mao himself showed no such remorse. As he watched the turmoil, the aging leader is said to have exulted, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”
The Cultural Revolution aimed to restore Mao’s once-domineering sway over China. The movement’s first principle was destruction of the institutions that had governed China since its revolution culminated in 1949, meaning the senior bureaucracy and even the upper ranks of the Communist Party that Mao himself had founded. 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, as in the case of China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, who was purged and died in detention in 1969.
In the weeks since Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. president, my thoughts have repeatedly turned back to that time, which is remembered in China as an era of such thorough disaster that public discussion of it remains tightly censored.
What follows is not a prediction that the United States is about to experience destruction and violence sanctioned from above on the scale that turned China upside down from 1966 to 1976. I hope I am correct in believing that the United States’ pluralism and its older and deeper democratic institutions will be resilient enough to forestall such a fate. But I am not entirely confident. Even at this early moment in the transitional period after the Nov. 5 election, the parallels are too many to ignore.
Take the matter of complete loyalty to the agenda of a party leader. Troy Nehls, a sycophantic Republican congressman from Texas, recently said of the president-elect: “He’s got a mission statement, and his goals and objectives, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. If Donald Trump says jump 3 feet high and scratch your head, we all jump 3 feet high and scratch our heads.”
If Nehls’s language is extreme, the sentiment behind it is not. Many Republicans have vowed nearly unquestioned support for Trump’s policies and decisions. Many invoke what they call Trump’s strong mandate to justify their unwavering support, the kind of rationale normally reserved for a large electoral victory. Yet Trump did not actually win in a landslide. According to the latest tallies, Trump won less than 50 percent of the popular vote, beating Kamala Harris by a mere 1.6 points. That is the third-smallest margin of victory in a U.S. presidential election since 1888.
Echoes of the Cultural Revolution resound loudest in Republican policymakers’ support for Trump’s picks for his cabinet and other major positions—even when the candidates are grotesquely unqualified or come trailing clouds of unseemly, possibly criminal behavior.
Consider Matt Gaetz, Trump’s former nominee for attorney general, who withdrew his candidacy last week. Gaetz, a Trump loyalist with little legal experience, has been investigated by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that he may have “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” CNN has reported that one woman told the committee that she had sex with Gaetz when she was a minor, according to sources familiar with the testimony. Gaetz denies all these allegations.
As Karl Rove, a veteran conservative political operative, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Rather than for any particular skill or competency, Mr. Gaetz was selected because he promised he would smite Mr. Trump’s enemies within the Justice Department and hound his opponents outside it.” Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin essentially said much the same when he told CNBC, “I think the president wants a hammer at the DOJ, and he sees Matt Gaetz as a hammer.”
When asked if she would vote for Gaetz as attorney general, Sen. Marsha Blackburn said that she and her Republican peers are ready to support “every single one” of Trump’s nominees. “It is important that our nation have these positions filled and filled quickly,” she added, “and I can tell you I’m going to be there to vote ‘aye’ and to make certain that the president’s cabinet and these positions are filled as quickly as we can possibly do it.”
Gaetz’s tenure in Congress left some of his Republican colleagues with such a negative view of him that they were unwilling to support his pick despite their loyalty to Trump, leading Gaetz to withdraw his candidacy. Yet Trump’s replacement choice, Pam Bondi, is unlikely to face the same kind of pushback, and she has also vowed to pursue Trump’s retribution agenda. “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted—the bad ones,” she said during a TV appearance in August 2023. “The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state, last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated.”
To my ears, this all has an eerily Maoist ring to it. Another of Mao’s well-known sayings was, “Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? This is the main question of the revolution.”
The other pillar of China’s era of chaos is equally present. Most of the Republican Party has somehow convinced itself that whatever its exalted leader wants must be right and good, even if that leads to the destruction of the United States’ institutions. This is precisely the formula that led China down the road to disaster. Yet it is simply not possible to pretend that the credentials of many of Trump’s nominees are even remotely well-matched to their designated roles.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon, has no high-level defense policy experience and has never run a large organization. (He has also faced sexual assault allegations—which he denies—maintains ties to Christian nationalists, and once wrote that the military and police would have to choose sides in a “civil war” if Democrats won the 2020 election.)
Matthew Whitaker, the nominee for ambassador to NATO—Washington’s most important alliance, which Trump has often disparaged—has no diplomatic or foreign-policy expertise. Tulsi Gabbard, chosen to oversee the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus, is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and served in Iraq, but she has no significant experience in either high-level intelligence or management.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to be the secretary of health and human services, has a record of opposing vaccinations, among other positions that go against medical convention. Linda McMahon, put forward to run the Department of Education—which Trump has promised to eliminate—has never been a professional teacher and once falsely claimed to have an education degree. Mehmet Oz, the proposed head of Medicare and Medicaid, is a heart surgeon, yes, but he lacks government and public health experience. Doug Burgum, named to run the Department of the Interior—which is responsible for conserving federal lands—is an ardent proponent of opening these areas to commercial energy production.
Given these picks, it is hard to escape the impression that Trump’s aim is actually gleeful wholesale disruption. There is another name for this: chaos. These moves—taken together with the Trump team’s refusal thus far to sign ethics agreements meant to guide the transition and its resistance to FBI background checks for its nominees—suggest that Trump is engineering an outright “power grab” or “hostile takeover” of the U.S. government.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Steve Bannon, a Trump ally and former advisor to the president-elect, who is himself known as something of a “chaos agent.” As Bannon recently told the New York Times, “Donald Trump is a blunt-force instrument applying blunt-force trauma to the system.”