MAGA Maoism: Trumpism as a Third World Movement

The MAGA movement has very little in common with modern Western civilisation

‘‘Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent’’ - Mao Zedong

Kill The Sparrows!

In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong declared a jihad against the humble Eurasian tree sparrow.

Overnight, posters went up everywhere exhorting the Chinese to exterminate sparrows and other pests so as to ‘‘build happiness for ten thousand generations.’’

Hundreds of millions of Chinese were mobilised for the crusade. Mao himself demanded the enlistment of child soldiers, telling the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress: ‘‘The whole people, including five-year old children, must be mobilized to eliminate the four pests.’’¹

The sparrows were systematically hunted, burned and shot wherever they could be found. Millions terrorised them to their deaths, banging loud pots and drums near their nests until the frightened sparrows eventually dropped from the sky out of exhaustion. Others went out into the forests to climb trees and smash their eggs.

The societal mobilisation for this effort was total. Refusal to participate was tantamount to treason. Dutch historian Frank Dikotter found archival records showing at least one elderly man spent a month in confinement north of Beijing for failing to catch enough sparrows.² All in all, up to two billion sparrows were slaughtered in a bloodbath of revolutionary fervour.

What on Earth motivated this maniacal crusade? Mao believed the tiny birds were robbing the Chinese people of their revolutionary gains by stealing the grain harvest. By wiping out the sparrow, Mao would ‘’conquer nature,’’ boosting grain yields to pay for the rapid forced industrialisation of China.

The only problem was that the sparrows hunted locusts. Free from their natural predators, locust populations exploded across China, blanketing the skies and devouring grain crops. The resulting famine killed at least 40 million people in a disaster of world-historic proportions.

Far from conquering nature, Mao and his regime were broken on its back; his fervent commitment to ideological purity and magical thinking in the face of science, reason and conflicting evidence brought about the single greatest economic policy disaster in the entirety of human history.

Trump’s Unique Pathologies

‘‘Chairman Mao is the reddest, reddest sun in our hearts’’ - Maoist Cultural Revolution era poster held by the Library of Congress

‘‘We can't just ignore the president's desires’’ - Vice President J.D. Vance

Like Chairman Mao, President Donald Trump subscribes to a wide range of bizarre crackpot theories about economics, politics and world affairs. And like the Great Helmsman, he too has managed to concentrate an extraordinary amount of power in his hands, building up an immense personality cult so as to terrify other figures in his party into submission.

Checks and balances on Trump’s power limited the carnage he could cause in his first term. In his first four years of rule, Trump seems to have been hemmed in by officials and advisors who were able to thwart some of his most dangerous and deranged impulses.

He and his team were also inexperienced at handling the levers of government and often clueless when it came to navigating the federal bureaucracy - a factor that eventually convinced Trump that some kind of ‘‘deep state’’ stood against him, dedicated to opposing him and thwarting him at every turn.

This ‘‘deep state’’ concept was in turn cribbed from Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, importing the politics of a semi-developed middle income country governed by a dysfunctional hybrid authoritarian regime to twenty-first century America.

This ‘‘deep state’’ served as a useful foil, a kind of WWE Wrestling heel for Trump to blame when his most hardcore supporters started wondering why he wasn’t getting much done. No, Trump was not retarded and incompetent, you see - he was playing 10D chess behind the scenes with Q against the deep state and he was about to have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton executed for treason at Guantanamo Bay, simply Trust The Plan, etc.

When not plotting with Q, Trump mostly dedicated himself to golf trips and petty feuds and vendettas waged against thousands of random media, business and political figures he believed had crossed him at some point or another during the latter half of the twentieth century. It was honestly an okay arrangement. He left the actual task of governance to a kind of Kushner-Mnuchin duumvirate caretaker regime which kept the economy and stock market humming along by simply leaving things be.

This is probably what allowed a number of tech and Wall Street titans to convince themselves that a second Trump term would be fine because ‘nothing ever happens,’ etc. What they failed to notice was that his cult of personality had actually grown in ferocity since 2020, giving him near total domination over the Republican Party and the Republican-controlled Congress. He could now finally hold the entire world economy hostage to his pet theories.

What exactly do these theories posit? Drawing deep from the wellsprings of Trump’s bleak and nihilistic mind, Trump’s unified grand theory of economics essentially holds that the very concept of voluntary economic exchange is impossible: every transaction must have a winner and a ‘’sucker.’’

For example, take the simple act of buying a bag of groceries. When you voluntarily purchase a bag of groceries for $20, you might think yourself better off. After all, you’ve exchanged money for goods that you wanted to buy.

Not according to Trump - according to his theory, you have been ‘’raped and pillaged’’ by the grocery store clerk. These are the actual words he used to describe trade between America and Europe. When American companies freely decide to purchase European goods, Europe ‘’rapes and pillages’’ America.

This bizarre and frankly stupid understanding of trade seems to be one of the only fixed concepts in Trump’s world view (Weltanschauung) over the past 40 years. Bob Woodward captured him in one of his many books on the Trump Presidency obsessively writing ‘‘TRADE IS BAD’’ on a loose sheet of paper. And he has gone so far in recent weeks as to embrace full-blown Maoist autarky, declaring: ‘’We shouldn’t have supply chains.’’

It really is a kind of twenty-first century American version of Lysenkoism - the discredited branch of pseudoscience promoted by Stalin to harmonise genetic science and biology with the core principles of Marxist ideology. Just as Lysenkoism emerged from the pathologies of a society subjected to Stalinist ideological insanity, Trump’s gangster economics reflect his own deep-seated inner pathologies. They satisfy his natural instinct as a veteran of shady business dealings in 1970s era New York that the world is divided between street smart toughs and the ‘’losers’’ and ‘’suckers’’ who end up victimised by them.

Normally we wouldn’t have to care so deeply about the pathologies and psychological complexes of random semi-criminal Manhattan property tycoons, but unfortunately Trump’s current temporary possession of the Weltgeist (World Spirit) mean we must deal with his psychological complexes projected onto the grand stage of world history. Just as Mao’s demented psychological flaws held all of China hostage through the 1950s and 1960s, the entire world is now held hostage to Trump and his primitive, strangely Maoist worldview.

Trump’s Maoist Assault on International Capital

‘‘The most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era’’ - The Economist

‘‘I will say a prayer for victory’’ - J.D. Vance

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.

At least $5 trillion in capital was almost instantly wiped from American stock markets; former United States Secretary of the Treasury Larry H. Summers made a rough calculation that the loss from the tariff policy would total almost $30 trillion. Capital Economics, a research firm, estimated that inflation may double in America to an annual rate of 4%.³ Matthew C. Klein meanwhile wrote that the American people’s expected tax burden had increased by 2% of the national income over just two months.⁴

The sheer incompetence on display was jaw-dropping, too. It appears that the White House used ChatGPT to calculate the formula for the tariffs and their model used internet domains to identify countries. This resulted in Trump somehow managing to place tariffs on the joint US-UK Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean as well as 10% tariffs on an uninhabited barren Antarctic volcanic island under Australian jurisdiction.

The tiny French island of Saint Pierre and Miquelon (population 5,800) was hit with the highest effective tariff rates in the world because they appear to have bought high voltage electricity distribution switchgear from America and returned it as a temporary re-export for repairs. Meanwhile the Australian territory of Norfolk Island (population 2,000) was hit with a 29% tariff rate because some erroneously-labelled shipments over the past five years mistakenly listed the Australian Norfolk Island instead of Norfolk, UK or Norfolk, Virginia. The island actually had no export relationship with the US.

Most alarmingly, ChatGPT appeared to have hallucinated the tariff formula incorrectly so that all announced tariff rates were too big by a factor of four. The centre-right American Enterprise Institute think tank found that a basic error in Trump’s tariff formula meant that two of the terms in the equation cancelled each other out. Trump’s tariff announcements which precipitated the full blown market crash were therefore four times larger than intended.⁵

And amidst all this stupidity and incompetence, it was not immediately clear how the policy was even supposed to work to bring back American manufacturing. Nobody could be quite sure how placing tariffs on Lesotho gemstones, Madagascar vanilla beans, Indonesian coffee beans, Cambodian textiles, Australian beef exports and random US military bases in the Indian Ocean would revive manufacturing in the United States of America.

Indeed, quite a few commentators and economists observed that these policies would probably actually harm American manufacturing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, American manufacturing recently hit near record levels of industrial output. Could American manufacturers maintain current levels of industrial output if Trump’s tariffs suddenly raised prices for industrial inputs like raw materials and parts?

One commentator, Jeremiah Johnson, pointed out that half of all the imports in the United States last year were inputs used to make other products: ‘‘You're going to see manufacturing businesses dying left and right over the next year. It’s going to be catastrophic.’’⁶

Did Trump care about any of this? Apparently not. He went golfing in Florida for the weekend and posted videos on Truth Social bragging about crashing the economy ‘‘on purpose’’ so as to lower government debt repayments. On the flight home, he told reporters: ‘‘Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.’’

Indeed, the rhetoric was strikingly Maoist. Prominent Trumpist and Steve Bannon War Room co-host Natalie G. Winters denounced ‘‘running dogs of the elite’’ while MAGA influencer Tim Pool crowed on Twitter that Trump had done more damage to billionaires than the left had done in decades.

MAGA Maoism: Trumpism as a Third World Political Movement

‘‘Chairman Mao gives us a happy life’’ - Maoist propaganda poster, 1954

This is why I feel the need to help popularise the concept of MAGA Maoism.

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.

I believe that the central motivating force behind the movement is a rejection of the Enlightenment and liberal modernity. In place of reason it exalts superstition, magical thinking and primitive suspicion of anything beyond direct experience. It is the ideology of the medieval peasant, the goat herder, the cab driver who blames all world problems on the Jews. Its motivating essence is simple: ‘‘Burn anything I can’t understand.’’

Of course, there will be those who say that Trump and Trumpism are as American as apple pie. Yes, America has a long tradition and history of hucksters and con-men. Nativism, racism, conspiracism and illiberal authoritarianism have been features of American life going back centuries now. I noted earlier that Trump’s worldview draws heavily on his experience of the corrupt real-estate world of 1970s New York. But there really is a strong argument to be made that MAGA is alien to the very civilisation it claims to be speaking for.

Where the Founding Fathers preached limited constitutional government and political restraint, MAGA demands unquestioning love and adoration from each and every citizen. Its political demands are frequently incoherent and nonsensical and the movement is prone to wild policy swings based on the whims of a leader who changes his mind based on whatever the last person told him. Randomly lashing out and smashing things, it is all fuelled by endless hatred, fury and resentment, emotions which seem to bubble out of the earth for these people like some kind of infernal scatological geyser.

The closest political comparisons to the MAGA suicide-death cult are probably ISIS, Peru’s Shining Path, Aum Shinrikyo (the Japanese cult that released sarin on the Tokyo subway), the Jim Jones doomsday cult and Maoism.

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.

South African President Thabo Mbeki's HIV/AIDs denialism ultimately resulted in the preventable deaths of up to 350,000 people. He appointed his very own version of RFK Jr named Manto Tshabalala-Msimang who advocated unproven herbal remedies such as garlic, beetroot, and lemon juice to treat AIDS. They instituted policies denying antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and Mbeki even restricted the use of a pharmaceutical company's donated supply of nevirapine, a drug that helps keep newborns from contracting HIV. 350,000 died as a result of this lunacy. These are the real world consequences of turning your national public health strategy over to charlatans, witch doctors, shamans, Twitter users named ‘’Cat Turd,’’ etc. MAGA truly is a Third World movement and recent American outbreaks of medieval diseases like measles prove it.

And let me just say one thing here before leftists get mad at me for cultural essentialism or whatever. Please note that some socialist intellectuals actually noticed this American pattern of political Third-Wordification well before me. The late socialist writer and intellectual Mike Davis even observed a ‘‘core-periphery dynamic’’ within the American political system that helped bring Trump to power:

‘‘The less-than-500 counties Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output. Trump voters, the countryside against the cities, have become something like the American version of the Khmer Rouge.’’⁷

And true to this core-periphery dynamic, Trump sounds more and more like a post-colonial studies academic each and every day.⁸ He tells the world that America has been ‘‘looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far.’’

He genuinely appears to regard America as a post-colonial power, exploited by foreign imperialists and multinational businesses. In his eyes America is a fallen, morally debauched power preyed upon by buzzards and he harbours a kind of Maoist-Third Worldist hostility towards anybody who would seek to question this narrative by portraying the US in a morally idealistic light. Consider Trump’s infamous comment defending Putin by way of equivocation: ‘’There are a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country's so innocent?’’

Out of this cynicism he is happy to ally with Putin over Europe, something which would never make sense according to any standard, conventional account of America’s national self-interest. Europe represents a $20 trillion economy while Russia represents the husk of a former empire experiencing deep and profound social crisis and decline. Its economy is a mere one tenth the size of Europe. But Russia positions itself under Putin as a bulwark against liberalism and ‘’globalism,’’ so Trump prefers Russia.

This is even despite all of Putin’s constant efforts to revitalise a kind of disgusting simulacra of Soviet Third Worldism. Putin loves to weaponise leftist anti-colonial talking points against the West and his odious Foreign Minister Lavrov even fronted the media recently to go full Ibram X. Kendi by declaring that the West was responsible for all problems in modern world history: ‘’Over the 500 years all tragedies in the world originated in Europe or occurred owing to European policies: The colonisation, the Crimean War, Napoleon, World War I, Hitler.’’

Putin builds on this kind of anti-West, Jackson Hinkle-style slop with overtures to clownish junta basket-case regimes in Africa and the Global South. Somehow, MAGA warriors still hold the idea of allying with him — and the broader BRICS clown coalition against the decadent West — in high regard.

Ultimately, there is no depth to which MAGA influencers will not stoop in their blind worship of the mad king. This is perhaps demonstrated most clearly by their newfound construction of a cult of poverty and sacrifice around Trump and his tariff policies.

The MAGA Cult of Poverty and Sacrifice

‘‘ASSAD OR WE BURN THE COUNTRY’’ - Pro-Assad graffiti found scrawled on the wall of a burned out apartment building in central Homs, Syria

‘‘We’d rather feed on grass than betray the principles of Marxism–Leninism!’’ - Slogan in Hoxhaist Albania during a time of mass starvation

In repudiating Mao’s disastrous legacy, Deng Xiaoping famously declared: ‘‘Poverty is not socialism. To get rich is glorious.’’ Stunningly, MAGA is now to the left of Chinese Communist grandee Deng Xiaoping on this question.

We first began to see the stirrings of the MAGA cult of self-sacrifice towards the beginning of March when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick took to CBS News to declare that Trump’s tariffs would be ‘’worth it’’ even if they caused a massive recession. MAGA Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins took to national television to instruct the American people to begin raising chickens in their backyards while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent lectured Americans that the American dream was not predicated on ‘’access to cheap goods.’’

The MAGA Maoist cult of sacrifice and suffering only began to fully take off after Liberation Day though. As Trump took to Truth Social to brag about deliberately crashing the market, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro told viewers: ‘‘I don't really care about my 401(k) today. You know why? I believe in this man.’’

MAGA influencer Benny Johnson (3 million subscribers) sounded like a Bolshevik commissar straight out of the 1930s, telling followers: ‘‘Losing money costs you nothing. It builds character.’’ Fellow MAGA influencer Tim Poole went even further: ‘‘Just ban all imports.’’

Another MAGA influencer with 400,000 followers on Twitter started urging MAGA against the idle pleasures of mass consumerism: ‘’You do NOT need the new iPad. You do NOT need the new Cell Phone. You do NOT need the new video game console. You WANT them.’’

Meanwhile a prominent MAGA apologist who once moonlighted as a professional sex tourist in South East Asia cheered on the destruction as an act of vengeance against gay people. Matt Forney - perhaps better known for his disturbing title ‘Do the Philippines: How to Make Love with Filipino Girls in the Philippines’ - delighted in the general carnage and wreckage:

‘‘I don’t care about your fake and gay stock market collapsing, boomers. You locked me in a decaying commie block apartment over the flu and cost me my job. I’m nearly 40, in the worst job market in nearly a century, because of YOUR greed and selfishness. I voted for this.’’

As the market crash deepened and backlash to Trump grew on social media, the MAGA cult of sacrifice began to resemble more and more the mindset of Soviet hardliners in the late 1980s. I saw one MAGA account argue that Americans should not drink coffee, while another argued that each American should be limited to just one pair of shoes.

Self-declared MAGA ‘Marxist’ Batya Ungar-Sargon meanwhile went full Baghdad Bob in attempting to portray Trump’s tariff policy as a spiritual effort to address the ‘‘spiritual decimation’’ of American men. Trump was trying to address ‘‘a crisis in masculinity,’’ she told us: ‘’We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living and rely on brawn and physicality off to other countries to build up their middle class.’’

Just how Trump’s tariffs on Antarctic penguins were supposed to address this spiritual crisis of masculinity remained unclear, but Fox News helpfully picked up the theme and ran with it. Fox anchor Jesse Waters aired a story praising Trump’s ‘‘Manly Tariffs,’’ telling viewers: ‘‘When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. And if you're out working … you are around other guys. You're not around HR ladies and lawyers that give you estrogen.’’

In other words, it took MAGA less than one day to start calling free trade ‘‘gay’’ like some kind of middle-school struggle session.

All this soaring rhetoric did at least manage to remind me of the Khmer Rouge’s attempts to forge ‘proletarian consciousness’ through physical labour. Take the following passage from Philip Short’s Pol Pot biography for example:

‘‘To Pol Pot, manual labour had another, more important purpose. It was a means of forging ‘proletarian consciousness’, that immaterial, indefinable quality that, contrary to all Marxist principles, Pol Pot had viewed since the late 1960s as the touchstone of revolutionary virtue. This ‘theory of proletarianisation’, as it was called, held that through manual labour, anyone, whatever his class origin, could acquire ‘the materialist discipline of the factory worker.’’⁹

Batya and Trump simply wish to forge a new proletarian consciousness in the American worker, you see.

Batya’s arguments about a ‘’spiritual’’ dimension to Trump’s tariff policy in fact reminded me of the messianic fervour communicated by young Trump acolytes in Mana Afsari’s recent essay on the Trump movement.

One young man told Mana - apparently without any hint of irony - that he saw Trump as a Christ-like figure: ‘‘(Surviving the Butler assassination attempt gave) him a … I’m not going to say messianic, but anointed sense. We do not understand the goals of whatever or whoever decided that it would be so, but there is something happening here beyond our understanding.’’¹⁰

Inspiring! Recall Jesus Christ’s command in the Gospel of Luke: ‘’If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—and yes, even his own life—he cannot be My disciple’’ (Luke 14:26).

Trump supporters take this Gospel teaching and apply it to the MAGA movement. They are willing to endure any hardship and sacrifice everything - family, nation, material comfort, possibly even their own lives - for the sake of Trump’s brain dead tariff plan which in turn relies upon a brain dead ChatGPT tariff formula that doesn’t even make mathematical sense. You will own nothing and be happy!

Timothy Snyder recently diagnosed this millenarian, almost apocalyptic tendency within the MAGA movement: ‘‘That's the point that you can't actually justify any of this in terms of a conventional account of the interest of the United States. I think what is going on instead is a logic of sacrifice, of making things worse, which at its depth, it comes down to hero worship.’’¹¹

It is worth noting here that there is a growing strain on the American far-right that openly touts economic impoverishment and decline as preferable to a prosperous and cosmopolitan America. The most extreme among them openly embrace stagnation and decline so long as they can rule the rubble.

For example, Nick Fuentes took to Twitter in January to declare in the wake of the H1-B visa controversy: ‘’I don’t really care about the economy that much I just don’t want to live in a country that looks like India.’’

Another MAGA acolyte went viral at the same time for the following tweet: ‘’I would rather have a country with zero Indians than have rockets on Mars.’’

Think here of the mindset of the Maoist cadres who imposed Mao’s insane policies on recalcitrant villagers even with the full knowledge that Mao’s policies would doom entire swathes of the Chinese countryside to destruction and annihilation.

Frank Dikotter’s work ‘’Mao’s Great Famine’’ records that senior Chinese Communist Party leader Tan Zhenlin was blunt, addressing cadres in South China in October 1958: ‘‘You need to fight against the peasants … There is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.’’¹²

Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi meanwhile defended the mass killing and destruction in the following terms: ‘’Casualties have indeed appeared among workers, but it is not enough to stop us in our tracks. This is a price we have to pay, it’s nothing to be afraid of.’’¹³

Like Chen Yi and the Maoist radicals, Trump and MAGA are happy to pay any price to achieve victory in their grand ideological quest to make America a poorer and more insular country.

Noah Smith put this very well recently: ‘’When reality doesn’t cooperate, Trump himself doesn’t even notice or care; instead, he simply lets the American people suffer for his theory’s failures.’’¹⁴

Trump’s tariff policy is ultimately just another rendition of Mao’s insane sparrows campaign, an attempt to make reality bend to the will of fanatical ideology. The American nativist right have made themselves into Taliban-like suicide bombers, holding America hostage in their death embrace.

Year Zero of American Juche: The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

‘‘The whole world admires us, sings our praises and learns from us’’ - Pol Pot

‘‘Not using money, prohibiting markets, using a supply system to meet people’s needs ... the world never thought of such policies before’’ - Khmer Rouge Central Committee study document

Juche is the state ideology of North Korea. Emphasising racial purity and isolation from foreign influence, it is a policy of total national self-reliance which views foreign trade with the utmost suspicion. North Koreans are tasked with producing everything they need domestically, from food to tractors to missiles.

The results of this natural economic experiment have been infamous: famine, poverty and a state of profound technological and industrial backwardness compared to their free-trading cousins in the South. Results were similar in Hoxhaist Albania, where ‘Enver Hoxha’ tractors utilising 1920s era technology were still in use in the late 1980s.¹⁵

I think Geremie Barme explains Trump’s affinity for Juche ideology best:

‘‘Trump Juche imagines an America that’s autarkic, alienated from the West, dominated by an all-powerful leader, and backed by a population that’s willing to endure hardships foisted on it by that leader as noble, necessary sacrifices to realize his vision of national greatness. Because the leader controls everything, and because he’s worshipped fanatically and unquestioningly, personal suffering becomes a form of patriotic sacrifice to advance his vision.’’¹⁶

Barme notes that Juche-style policies of national ‘’self-reliance’’ have their origins in Maoist isolationism and Stalinism. It is an approach which probably reached its darkest zenith in Pol Pot’s Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot held to a metaphysical theory that Cambodia could develop a self-sufficient communist society if people simply developed the right mindset. Ideology would be enough to transform Cambodia into a utopia:

‘‘Is the possession of technical skills a result of education and culture, or does it come from the stance of socialist revolution? It comes from the socialist revolution. By cultivating good political consciousness, we can all learn swiftly… Formerly to be a pilot required a high school education… [Now it takes three months]. It’s clear that political consciousness is the decisive factor.’’¹⁷

Under the Khmer Rouge, foraging for food was banned even as the countryside was gripped by famine. Cars were cut apart by village blacksmiths and the metal melted down to make ploughshares. Motors were adapted to drive water-pumps while the wheels were attached to ox-carts. Perhaps revealing himself to be a follower of Fox News anchor Jesse Waters from the future, Pol Pot disdained mechanisation, ‘‘viewing it as a sign of weakness, of lack of confidence in the peasants’ strength.’’¹⁸ His primitive regime ultimately escalated to the point of just outright executing anybody with glasses. How far out are the MAGA cultists from such a step?

Why It Will All Collapse

Ultimately, this is all going to collapse and end in tears. These people are just genuinely mentally insane. They think a popular vote margin of 1.5 per cent entitles Trump to make himself God Emperor for life and install a Khmer Rouge Year Zero regime to send fruity theatre kids to the countryside to purge themselves of the gay through hard labour. What the fuck are these people thinking? Do they actually think people want this? Do they actually think people will accept economic collapse and stagflation to satisfy Trump’s senile ideological obsessions?

These people have nothing in common with the civilisation they claim to speak for. They demand America abolish its 250 year old Constitution, abolish its liberal democratic heritage, so that the government can run Latin American tin pot dictatorship style paramilitary death squads.

This is MAGA Maoism. They hate everything good about Western civilisation: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, rule of law, presumption of innocence, trial by peers. They want death squads and struggle sessions against political enemies because they want to make America a Third World country.

They are going to fail, but my God they will inflict an insane and psychotic amount of destruction and suffering in the process.

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You can check out my video essay based on this article here:

1. Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature, 86-87.

2. Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, 291.

3. The Economist, ‘‘President Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc,’’ April 5 2025.

4. Matthew C. Klein, ‘‘How to Think About the Tariffs,’’ April 4 2025.

5. American Enterprise Institute, ‘‘President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error,’’ April 4 2025.

6. Jeremiah Johnson, ‘‘There Is No Plan, They’re Just Morons,’’ April 4 2025.

7. Mike Davis, ‘‘The Great God Trump & The White Working Class,’’ Catalyst Journal, 2017.

8. I owe this astute observation to Claire Lehrmann.

9. Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, 235.

10. Mana Afsari, ‘‘Last Boys at the Beginning of History,’’ Point Magazine, January 22 2025.

11. Timothy Snyder, ‘The New Paganism—A Framework for Understanding Our Politics.’

12. Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, 63.

13. Ibid., 70.

14. Noah Smith, ‘‘The Latest Episode of Mad King Trump,’’ March 30 2025.

15. Blendi Fevziu, Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania, 249.

16. Geremie Barme, ‘‘American Juche,’’ March 14 2025.

17. Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, 350.

18. Ibid., 350.