Latest news with #RotimiAdeoye
Axios
06-05-2025
- Business
- Axios
Trump's new nationalism
President Trump's grand economic vision relies on a simple tradeoff: that Americans will accept short-term personal sacrifice — higher prices, fewer options, slimmer profits — in service of long-term national strength. Why it matters: Trump is breaking sharply from free-market orthodoxy in his second term, blending bursts of anti-capitalism with a top-down, nationalist agenda for American dominance. Critics on the left and right warn of an emerging "MAGA Maoism" — a movement that demands ideological purity, glorifies economic sacrifice, and embraces state power as a means to reshape society. Trump's strongman instincts — and his deep skepticism of cultural elites and bureaucrats — have only intensified the provocative comparisons to China's revolutionary leader. What they're saying: "MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right," former congressional speechwriter Rotimi Adeoye wrote for The Washington Post last month. James Surowiecki, the first journalist to deduce that the White House used trade deficits to calculate its reciprocal tariffs, argued Monday that Trumpism is "becoming perversely, farcically Maoist." Drew Pavlou, an Australian anti-communism activist, wrote on Substack that "the entire world is now held hostage to Trump and his primitive, strangely Maoist worldview." Reality check: Trump's worldview is driven not by Marxist theory, but by a deeply held belief that America has been getting ripped off for decades. He's constrained by the rule of law, unlike China's totalitarian state — and there's no comparison to the mass death and violence committed by Mao's communist regime. Plus, much of Trump's agenda remains pro-capitalist: He champions private industry, not state ownership, and his appeals to sacrifice are rooted in geopolitical competition — not class struggle. White House spokesman Kush Desai told Axios in a statement: "The Trump administration's policies are delivering much-needed economic relief for everyday Americans while laying the groundwork for a long-term restoration of American Greatness." But listen to recent rhetoric from Trump and his top advisers, and it's clear why the analogy has gained traction. "We are a department store, and we set the price," Trump told TIME when asked about tariff rates. "I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price ... and they can pay it, or they don't have to pay it." "Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more," Trump mused last week when discussing potential supply shortages. In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," Trump said he'll personally call CEOs who make business decisions — such as advertising price increases from tariffs — that are "wrong" or "hurtful to the country." The intrigue: The MAGA movement sees industrial labor as the backbone of American identity, and is pursuing a vision steeped in nostalgia and nationalism. "This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here and your grandkids work here," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote in The Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Trump intends to usher in the most prosperous decade in American history — but not at the cost of the spiritual degradation of the working class," Bessent even suggested on a podcast that fired federal workers could help supply "the labor we need for new manufacturing" — drawing comparisons to Mao's policy of relocating urban elites to rural areas for "re-education." The big picture: Trump's embrace of centralized economic power is just one piece of a broader governing style that borrows heavily from strongman traditions. Ritualistic praise: Trump's televised Cabinet meetings always begin with his secretaries showering him in praise — casting the president as the only leader capable of restoring America's greatness. Loyalty tests: Trump and his aides have carried out mass purges of career officials deemed insufficiently loyal, including at the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. Civil society: Trump has sought retribution against the media, law firms, NGOs, and political opponents. Some Chinese see echoes of the Cultural Revolution, when nearly all of society's institutions were destroyed. War on academia: The Trump administration has cracked down on dozens of universities over alleged antisemitism and DEI programs, moving to weaken elite liberal institutions seen as hostile to MAGA. Military spectacle: The Pentagon plans to host a massive military parade — featuring 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles and 50 helicopters — on Trump's birthday in June, which coincides with the Army's 250th anniversary. The bottom line: There will be no communist revolution under Trump. But his second-term style reflects ideas the U.S. has long fought against — now reframed in nationalist terms.
Washington Post
08-04-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right
Rotimi Adeoye is a political writer and former congressional speechwriter to then-Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan). On 'Liberation Day' this past week, President Donald Trump announced a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods and far greater ones on individual countries. His administration framed it as a course correction to make America 'competitive' again. But if you listened closely, especially to his supporters, this wasn't just about trade. It was about work and the kinds of work that still count. Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: 'Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a 'product manager' ???' It's a joke, but it's also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn't just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution. What we're seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed 'wokeness' of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It's not about creating jobs. It's about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, 'Men in America don't need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.' This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America's factories with recently fired federal workers. It's a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle. This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to 'learn to code' while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines. What makes this iteration feel uniquely American is how aestheticized it has become. Online, there's an industry of memes and male micro-celebrities fetishizing rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity that is less about economic reality and more about identity performance. Trump doesn't need to build a single factory for that performance to succeed. He only needs to sell the image of one. There's political danger to this approach. I expect it to land with a thud in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It's the kind of suburb that didn't promise luxury, but offered enough: tree-lined streets, solid schools, and the belief that hard work and good behavior would lead to a decent life. For the children of immigrants — and for Pennsylvanians whose parents worked with their hands in factories or kitchens or on construction sites — the promise of white-collar stability carried real meaning. We were taught to reach for security, not power: get the degree, land the job, and trade our families' physical strain for something quieter, safer and more lucrative. Now, those aspirations are being rebranded as betrayal. The very things that once defined responsibility and success are recast by the new right as signs of softness and elitism. In communities like mine, where the American Dream was treated with reverence, the ground beneath it is starting to feel less like foundation and more like fiction. The American Dream is not a hammer. It never was. But Trump understands something vital about the moment: People are tired of markets and tired of waiting for politicians to fix the affordability crisis. In many parts of the country — especially in Pennsylvania — communities were hollowed out by deindustrialization, abandoned by a bipartisan consensus that viewed globalization as destiny. Wages stagnated. Towns emptied. The labor that once brought pride became precarious, then obsolete. Voters want to believe in something real — even if it's made of smoke. That is what his tariff strategy offers: not renewal, but revenge. And revenge sells. But nostalgia is not a plan. It's a mirror turned backward. Trump is not bringing back the dignity of work — he's marketing the image of it. His tariffs won't rebuild Bethlehem Steel. They won't revive the coal towns. But they will make life more expensive for working people, while feeding the fantasy that somewhere out there, the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.
