Hey guys, I had a brainstorm lying in bed last night. I didn't write about it cuz like Mao Zedong I don't trust brainstorms after taking my sleeping pill. But now it's morning. This brainstorm is going to require me to violate the Publocc stylistic code by resorting to the somewhat elastic "unless I have to" variance. My brainstorm is this: Donald Trump, completely unwittingly, has used, and continues to use, the tool that Mao Zedong used in preparation for and throughout the Cultural Revolution: loosely directing from the top a mass movement below against the government that they led while simultaneously insulating themselves from the conflagration that they fanned.

As many times as I read histories of the CR I never ceased to be astonished at Mao’s gambit and at its success. It was the only time in human political history that I am aware that such a thing had been done. Until Trump. Both men wrapped themselves in the flag while delegitimizing the institutions that the flag symbolized. Both demonized other patriots, Mao accusing those insufficiently loyal to him of secretly “waving the red flag to support the white flag”; Trump labeling those party members insufficiently loyal to him as “RINOS”, Republican in name only. Both men repeatedly purged those closest to them until only the most robotically loyal remained.

Both Mao and Trump had Svengali-like holds on their people and were able to convince tens of millions that there was a cultural war taking place, a class struggle between the people, personified in Mao and Trump, and other elites, deep in Zhongnanhai in the one, in an amorphous “deep state” in the other.  Both mobilized people who owed their loyalty only to them, not to the Party or other party or national leaders. The Red Guards are the singular example that knows no near parallel in America where Trump’s supporters are unorganized as units and diffuse but who still can be mobilized in the time it takes for a tweet from their Leader to “LIBERATE” states and to plot kidnapping and “peoples trials” against Governor Whitmer of Michigan, and against Liu Shaoqi in Beiing. 

Both were able to create among their followers a personality cult for themselves. Former Tennessee Senator Bob Shorter was the first Republican to identify Trump’s support as a personality cult. Both were able to completely take over his party’s apparatus and cow other party leaders into submission to his will. Both used the mass rally to extraordinary effect. Both dog-whistled their messages to their supporters, both used symbolic gestures to message. When Mao, in his ‘70’s, swam in the treacherous Yangtze River near the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the image of him emerging, still vigorous and unharmed, in bathrobe smiling and waving appeared in every publication across China and electrified the nation. When Trump emerged from Walter Reed hospital and climbed the steps up to the White House, he dramatically removed his facemask in a symbolic gesture that he was god-like, that he had “beat COVID”. Trump never said a word.  (Maybe you can still get the coins commemorating the moment from the White House gift shop, I said maybe.) Mao’s appearance, with military flashes on his collar, atop the Forbidden City before a million Red Guards in Tiananmen Square was his stamp of approval on the movement and its violence. Mao never said a word. When he permitted Song Binbin to pin a Red Guard armband onto him he became one with them. 

Mao Zedong’s hold on power in the Chinese Communist Party and in China lasted for the ten years from the start of the Cultural Revolution until his death in 1976. His hold did slip though. Permanent revolution is not sustainable; neither is a permanent political campaign. Purging stops when the purger is purged. When the paranoid Lin Biao, Mao’s last chosen successor apparently fled to the Soviet Union Mao was deeply shaken at the show of disloyalty. So were Mao’s masses. Marshal Lin’s defection was a bridge too far even for the truest believers. Immediately after Mao’s death his ruling clique, the Gang of Four, was arrested. A cult of personality is not transferable. Donald Trump has now been defeated at the ballot box, he will be forced to relinquish that power that he used to enforce his will and command loyalty, and he and some of his closest aides are going to be arrested. Trump though is not dead and has given signs that he intends to hold his supporters, they also are not transferable, and hold power over the Republican Party, for another campaign in 2024 or as kingmaker. Trump’s power however is gone; his hold on his Party has already slipped just as Mao’s did after Lin’s defection. The Republican Party will survive just as the CPC did after Mao, but like the CPC it will have to be purged of Trumpism. Like Mao’s successors Trump’s in the Republican Party will have to issue an official verdict that “Mao’s Last Revolution,” like Trump’s was the gravest mistake in the history of the CPC and in the People’s Republic of China. Today, and for many years, the Cultural Revolution is a closed subject in China, not entirely forgotten but not much talked about either. So it will be with Donald Trump and Trumpism.