By Samirul Ariff Othman

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: Not to be alarmist, but if you squint hard enough, America under Trump starts to look a little like China under Mao—metaphorically speaking, of course.

No, Trump is not Mao, and America is not China in the 1960s. But the outlines are there, and they’re worth paying attention to. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to purge bourgeois influence and reassert ideological control.

It wasn’t just a political project—it was a national fever dream. The Gang of Four rose to prominence not because they were good at running things, but because they were good at being loyal.

Red Guards swarmed universities, tore down centuries of intellectual tradition, and waged war on the mind itself. Ideas became threats. Expertise became betrayal. Sound familiar?

Fast forward to Trump’s America, and while no one’s burning books in the streets, there is a different kind of ideological vanguard forming. It doesn’t wear armbands.

It wears MAGA hats and tweets in all caps. It’s not operating through party hierarchy—it’s operating through personal loyalty and media spectacle.

Think of the Trump constellation: Jared Kushner, tasked with Middle East peace despite zero diplomatic training; Stephen Miller, who reengineered immigration policy from an ideological trench; Steve Bannon, who declared war on the “deep state”; and Elon Musk, who, while not in government, seems to be shaping American discourse, space policy, and even wartime communications from the comfort of his Tesla.

These aren’t cabinet secretaries. They’re courtiers in a palace powered by algorithms, cable news, and cultural grievance.

What’s more worrying is the slow-motion assault on higher education and the knowledge economy. In Republican-led states, universities are being defunded, professors are being purged, and curricula are being rewritten not by scholars, but by ideologues. DEI programs are being gutted. AP African American Studies is under fire.

Books are being banned—not quietly, but with cameras rolling. And while this isn’t Mao’s “Down with the Four Olds,” it rhymes. The message is the same: intellectual independence is dangerous, history is malleable, and dissent is unpatriotic.

This is where it gets uncomfortable. In Mao’s China, educated youth were sent to the countryside to work with peasants and be “re-educated.”

In today’s America, especially in MAGA circles, there’s a growing narrative that elevates coal miners and truckers as the only “real Americans,” while scientists, journalists, and professors are cast as out-of-touch elites.

They may say they’re honoring labor and blue-collar dignity—and that’s a worthy aim—but increasingly, it’s happening at the expense of treating critical thinking as a liability. And when nuance disappears from the public square, it’s often a sign that something deeper—and more dangerous—is quietly taking root.

And then there’s the language. “Fake news,” “enemy of the people,” “deep state”—this isn’t just political rhetoric. It’s a sustained effort to delegitimize the institutions that hold society together. It’s a loyalty test, and it’s one that disqualifies experts in favor of cheerleaders.

Just ask Dr. Fauci, who spent his career fighting pandemics only to be vilified for speaking in complete sentences. The endgame here isn’t better policy—it’s obedience. And when obedience replaces dialogue, democracy starts to go dark around the edges.

Let’s be clear: the United States is not a dictatorship. Not yet. They still hold elections. Their courts still function. The press, though battered and vilified, still reports. But democracies rarely die in a blaze—they decay in the dark.

One professor is fired for speaking out. One journalist is smeared as an enemy. One fact is bent, then broken, until truth itself buckles under the weight of repetition. What they’re living through isn’t a coup—it’s a slow-motion corrosion, a populist erosion of what it means to think critically, to question authority, to even trust in knowledge at all.

The tragic irony? The same movement that rails against Communist China is borrowing from its oldest authoritarian playbook: dismantle independent institutions, reward blind loyalty, and recast education as the enemy.

In trying to “save” America, they’re gutting the very engine that made it strong—its ability to think critically, argue openly, and learn fearlessly. If Mao waged war on the Four Olds, MAGA may be launching a war on the Four Smarts: science, journalism, diplomacy, and education. And once the mind is under siege, the body politic is next.

*Economist Samirul Ariff Othman is an adjunct lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Petronas, international relations analyst and a senior consultant with Global Asia Consulting.*