MORE THAN 15 MONTHS AGO, I explained how “America, itself, has verified that it is no longer a normal country” (see this link). Since I wrote that article, America’s grave political deformity has been stunningly ratified.
NORMAL VS ABNORMAL
Some Americans relish the idea of the US not being normal because they view it as a positively “extraordinary country” (link) despite America militarily out-spending the next nine countries combined and maintaining some 750 overseas military bases (link).
Just to be clear, I argued that the US was abnormal in the sense that it was a pulsing danger to itself and the world.
We should also appreciate that the striking abnormality of the US today long-predates the change of government in Washington on January 20, 2025. But, with the inauguration of the new Trump administration, it is increasingly evident that American governance has embraced local and globalized disruption and heresy hunting on a still more fevered scale than that witnessed at the height of McCarthyism in the US around 70 years ago.
What makes this uncommonly plain today are those who are now stressing that this is so.
Who thinks America has jumped the rails
The Economist is a highly influential global weekly. Since its creation close to 200 years ago in London, it has championed Western-liberal, political-economic values. In the post-war period, with the fading of the age of formal imperialism, it has been an exceptionally avid supporter of the universal superiority of Western values.
A key aspect of this advocacy has been its unrivalled backing of the US leadership role in advancing the claimed, globalized beneficial impact of this commanding worldview. It is, thus, a pivotal, media “canary in the coal mine” indicator of what elites in the broader Western world think of the new Trump administration.
In mid-November last year, following the re-election of President Trump, The Economist was watchful but still upbeat about their abiding, West-is-best project. The editor in-chief explained, during a US interview on National Public Radio, that: “Trump’s agenda may be chaotic — but she remained optimistic about possible good elements” (link here).
Now consider some headlines in The Economist since that interview.
- March 6, 2025: “MAGAlomania – Donald Trump’s economic delusions are already hurting America” (link)
- March 12, 2015: “Trump’s erratic policy is harming the reputation of American assets. Like the stockmarket, the dollar is also suffering from falling confidence and rising confusion” (link)
- March 30, 2025: “Trump’s “Liberation Day” is set to whack America’s economy. A rush of new tariffs will hurt growth, raise prices and worsen inequality” (link)
Meanwhile, another leading UK media outlet, The Guardian, lately argued that the US Vice President should resign, following his recent trip to Greenland (where he was about as welcome as a kitchen cockroach): “JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice-president should resign” (link).
There is, moreover, a rising tide of worldwide hostile commentary focussed on the extraordinary, regularly savage attacks on freedom of expression by the Trump administration, including:
- March 27, 2025: “Trump’s Attacks on Press Freedom Are Paving the Way for Authoritarianism” (link)
- March 27, 2025: “Ivy League convulsions – will we be next?” (link)
- March 28, 2025: “The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide” (link); and
- April 1, 2025: “Trump officials to review $9bn in Harvard funds over antisemitism claims” (link)
Just look at what you can do in America inside 90 days
Imagine if one of China’s super-wealthy spent US$250 million expressing his profound support for President Xi Jinping and was, very soon after, appointed to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s most elevated political body. But wait – in fact, this is utterly unimaginable.
Yet this is just what Elon Musk has pulled off in America, where he appears to have become, contrary to all previous US constitutional understanding, a de facto, additional Vice President – after spending more than $250 million supporting Donald Trump’s recent election. Musk is now the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) where he is instituting radical cost-cutting and staff dismissal changes across myriad Federal Government departments and agencies – and never mind the incandescent conflict of interest problems.
More recently, Mr Musk signed some million dollar cheques as he tried to sway a judicial election in Wisconsin (link).
And how could we forget:
- Turning the White House into the Fight House by transforming the venerated “Oval Office” into a globalized humiliation chamber (link);
- The exceptional intimidation of Greenland, Denmark, Panama and Colombia, coupled with the ‘Gulf of America’ renaming initiative (link);
- The dynamic amplification of America’s depraved, comprehensive complicity in Israel’s genocidal Gaza “cleansing” project (link);
- The (bipartisan) embrace of an industrial scale application of presidential pardons releasing even hardened criminals from jail and shielding relatives and political comrades from possible legal action, followed by the shutting down of prosecutions of friends of the new government;
- The scoff-law, cowboy-style, deportation round-ups;
- Unprecedented antagonism directed at local judges and towards the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice (to protect America’s genocidal friends in Israel);
- The ferocious, whip-saw use of caustic tariffs combined with profound threats to international shipping (link);
- International vaccine cost-cutting by Washington, arguably threatening the lives of over a million children worldwide (link); and
- Eviscerating the leadership of the National Institutes of Health – the primary US agency responsible for biomedical and public health research (link).
Next, consider the recent, joint Israeli-Palestinian produced, American Academy Award winning film, “No Other Land.” Mainstream American distribution of an American awarded film has been effectively banned.
And, following that award, a Palestinian director of this film was arrested by the Israeli army and beaten up after masked Jewish settlers attacked his home (link). Subsequently, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issued a statement “apologizing for not adequately expressing its support of the Palestinian Oscar-winning filmmaker Hamdan Ballal” (link).
Has America embarked on its own Cultural Revolution?
The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was initiated in China by Mao Zedong in 1966. It lasted for around a decade and affected over 700 million people. It caused massive upheaval and had terrible economic and (regularly lethal) personal consequences. Mao recklessly ceded much control over the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution to a group of confidants (led by his wife) who came to be known as the “Gang of Four” (link).
The People’s Daily described what happened in this way, on the 50th anniversary of its commencement: “The ‘Cultural Revolution’ was an event started wrongly by the leader…[that] brought severe catastrophe to the Party, country, and ethnic peoples, creating comprehensive and severe damage” (link).
The Cultural Revolution has ever since served as a compelling reminder, in China, that a repeat of this sort of profound, political, economic and social upheaval must be avoided at all costs.
Several Chinese commentators have noted a resonance between what the second Trump Administration has unleashed on America – and the world – and the Cultural Revolution in China.
One of these is a young Chinese scholar, Mao Keji, who is currently based at Harvard University in the US. He said, in a recent interview with The China Academy (link) that the radical approach of the core Trump team reminded him, “a little of China’s Cultural Revolution in the sense that a small group of political outsiders, with the tacit approval of their leader, had gained access to the core of government and power” (link).
Conclusion
Mao Keji shrewdly observed, during his extended interview, that:
“Predicting what will happen in the four years of Trump’s second term is extremely difficult, but for now, one thing seems certain: the US’s global influence will shrink significantly.”
….
“If Trump’s policymaking continues at its current pace, then by the end of his four years, the US alliance system, the dollar’s status as a global currency, America’s influence over multilateral institutions, its military presence across the world, and even its ideological and media dominance will all be significantly diminished.”
He also argued convincingly that, provided China “focuses on managing its own affairs effectively” – and absent any geopolitical disasters – “it is highly probable that by 2049, China will have overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy.”
Furthermore, China expert Professor Kerry Brown, from King’s College in London, recently emphasized how Beijing’s welcome predictability and plans to amplify education-based high quality growth contrasted favourably with “the bewildering daily news coming from Washington” (link).
In fact, there is a helpful test provided within the Mao – China Academy interview that can be used to measure where the US may find itself at the completion of this second Trump presidency in 2028:
- Will the role of the US dollar as the primary global currency by stronger – or weaker?
- Will the US system of Global West alliances be stronger – or weaker?
- Will American global influence be stronger – or weaker?
Serious, open reflection and clear, applied flexibility could still materialize within the White House, so that improvements could be banked combined with a clever step-back from the intense reliance, to date, on headline dominating, “pedal-to-the-metal” politics.
There is, though, no sign of this happening so far. Indeed, President Trump recently re-floated the prospect of his serving a third term, even though the American Constitution prohibits this. “There are methods” according to Mr Trump (link). Moreover, his “Gang of Two” (Elon Musk and JD Vance) continue to relish their globalized, radical activist roles, notwithstanding some discussion of Musk stepping back from his DOGE leadership (link).
Finally, the BBC lately quoted a report from the Aston Business School arguing that the sort of full-blown trade war the new Trump administration seems ready to trigger – battering friend and foe alike – could cost the US and its trading partners $1.4 trillion (link).
Pardon the mixed metaphors, but looking in from outside, the world could be forgiven for thinking that the US government has, since January 20, jumped the rails and sprinted off the reservation. As it happens, Mao Keji helps us understand, in a single short paragraph, why this may be so. He captures the essence of a central American vulnerability by quoting from the Chinese sci-fi novel Three-Body Problem Trilogy:
“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”
Richard Cullen is an adjunct law professor at the University of Hong Kong and a popular writer on current affairs.
To see a list of articles he has written for this outlet, click this phrase.
Image at the top by fridayeveryday.