What is MAGA Maoism?
MAGA Maoism is a term coined in my April 2025 Washington Post column to describe how Donald Trump fuses the aesthetics of sacrifice, struggle, and purification—borrowed from leftist revolutionary traditions like Maoism—with the nationalist politics of the American right.
This isn't about Marxism or communism. It's about the spectacle. Trump uses tariffs not just as economic policy, but as political theater. The same way Mao demanded struggle sessions, Trump performs sacrifice—factories, costs, enemies—to cast himself as the nation's redeemer.
Where it started:
Washington Post: MAGA Maoism is spreading through the populist right
Twitter: MAGA Maoism Explained
Axios: Trump’s New Nationalism - MAGA Maoism
Drew Pavlou’s Iceberg Journal: MAGA Maoism - Trumpism as a Third World Movement
Why it matters:
“MAGA Maoism” captures something many have sensed but struggled to name: that Trumpism is no longer just about economics or grievance—it's about ritualized struggle. The tariffs, the mass rallies, the attacks on the “deep state”—these aren’t just policy choices or talking points. They’re acts of political theater designed to signal sacrifice, purification, and moral rebirth.
Like Mao’s revolutionary campaigns, Trump’s version of populism thrives on the idea of crisis and rupture. There must always be an enemy: China, immigrants, elites, even disloyal Republicans. And there must always be a cost, higher prices, broken alliances, cultural upheaval—that is reframed as noble suffering in service of a greater nationalist goal.
Understanding MAGA Maoism helps explain why conventional policy critiques of Trump fall flat. His power isn’t rooted in legislative accomplishment. It’s rooted in symbolic politics—in the spectacle of cleansing a corrupt system through chaos, devotion, and punishing elites. That makes it harder to fight, because it's not an argument. It's a story.