Is Donald Trump Channeling Liz Truss and Chairman Mao?

Less than three months into his second term, Donald Trump conjures up the image of a three-headed hydra graced with the faces of Liz Truss, Britain’s failed prime minister; Chairman Mao Zedong, China’s despot ruler; and Marie Antoinette, the 18th-century queen who told the French to eat cake. Meanwhile, Gladiator, Director Ridley Scott’s Academy Award-winning tale of a debauched and self-venerating emperor remains the movie for our times.

Trump-imposed tariffs and executive orders have triggered a global stock market meltdown. Despite a pause in the fall, there appears to be no end to the recklessness and uncertainty the 47th president has unleashed. “Stagflation,” “recession,” and “inflation” have re-entered the lexicon. In a matter of days, the president destroyed $5.4 trillion in market value.

On reality television, Trump played an imperious mogul who barked, “You’re fired!” He ran six businesses into bankruptcy.

His latest tenure evokes memories of the United Kingdom’s Brexit and Liz Truss, the hapless Conservative politician who, in 2022, lasted just 44 days as prime minister. In 2016, just a few months before the U.S. elected Trump, the U.K. decided to leave the European Union. They had hoped Brexit would deliver something better.

Immediately after the ill-advised referendum, Trump appeared at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, hailing Brexit as a “great victory.” Nine years later, Britain’s growth remains anemic.

A parade of Conservative Party prime ministers came and went along the way. A head of lettuce outlasted a hapless and clueless Truss, whose spendthrift policies of tax cuts and borrowing, plus a blunderbuss effort to cap energy prices, made her the U.K.’s shortest-reigning premier. On her watch, the Pound tumbled, British equities markets sank, and rates ballooned.

Like American Republicans who know better, Truss opposed Brexit but enthusiastically supported the policy once U.K. voters approved it. By May 2023, even Nigel Farage, the godfather of Brexit, once a gadfly in the European Parliament and now a formidable Trump-like force in the British parliament, confessed that his brainchild flopped.

“Brexit has failed,” he admitted. “We’ve not delivered on Brexit, and the Tories have let us down very, very badly.” In 2016, Farage was a fixture at Trump Tower and even at Trump rallies. He attended Trump’s latest inauguration.

The spirit of Marie Antoinette flourishes in the West Wing, too. In response to market mayhem, Trump deflects blame and tells Americans to suck it up. “I don’t want anything to go down,” he says of the swooning markets he once cited as proof of his success. Inoculating himself, he immediately adds: “But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

Joe Biden left Trump with steady GDP growth and low unemployment, albeit with a legacy of inflation. Now, America confronts the possibility of stagflation, a slow economy, and rising prices caused by Trump’s crackpot mercantilist tariffs.

“Golfing While the World Burns,” one headline read as Trump golfed at his Doral club in Florida while the markets tumbled. As the U.S. and the world nursed its financial wounds, Trump won a passel of Trump golf course championships playing against the equivalent of the Washington Generals, the always-losing nemesis of the Harlem Globetrotters. And when the septuagenarian wasn’t golfing, he raised money at Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that “cheap goods” are not the essence of the American dream. He called them “Chinese baubles. ” The former George Soros ally is an ex-hedge fund manager with an estimated net worth of at least half a billion dollars. Marie Antoinette, derided by the populace as Madame Deficit for her lavish spending, would be proud.

Look closely; you see Trump doing his best Mao impersonation. The Chinese Communist Party Chair was never content merely to win power. He followed his Marxist takeover with ever more radical attempts to remake Chinese society, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Like Mao, Trump upends the U.S. economy through diktats.

“THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN,” Trump posted to social media.

For the record, the Great Leap Forward was a bust. Mao’s attempt to transform China’s agrarian economy into a manufacturing-based one ended badly, as did the bloody Cultural Revolution’s efforts to purge intellectuals and bolster China’s failed collective farming. Right now, projected U.S. economic growth is close to nil. Economists say a recession is likely and certain if Trump continues his tariff crusade.

Like the late chairman, Trump also mounts a relentless culture war. The press, elite universities, and law firms are no longer safe. He brazenly flexes the coercive power of government to make his enemies bend the knee. The Leviathan runs amok.

As the Associated Press has discovered, referring to the Gulf of Mexico means banishment from the White House press pool–although the venerable wire service won its case against the Trump in federal court on Tuesday. Everything has become politicized. Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps, barons of the legal profession, are now kissing Trump’s ring to survive, as did Columbia University. While some law firms stood and fought, they were in a minority.

Trump’s avarice is a reminder why George Washington famously served only two terms—to send a message that power should be briefly held and limited in scope. “The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism,” the first president said in his farewell message.

Trump now muses about an unconstitutional third term and challenges the authority of the courts. During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power.” Joe Sitt, a major player in New York real estate and an early Trump backer, chimed in: “We don’t have a president. We have a king.” Nine years later, Trump and his minions don’t mind the analogies.

“He will bring them death, and they will love him for it,” a Roman senator says of Commodus, the unstable emperor in Gladiator, the 2000 film. In the movies and real life, chaos-as-entertainment has its limits. While Trump’s base stands by him, the electorate stirs.

In Wisconsin, which narrowly went for Trump over Kamala Harris, voters last week elected liberal Susan Crawford to the state Supreme Court by 10 points, a landslide in what is arguably the nation’s most closely divided state. In Florida, the GOP held on to two House seats by relatively narrow margins, given their heavily Republican leanings. Democrats who seemed despondent just a few weeks ago know Trump is giving them the chance to return from exile.

Meanwhile, even Trump-chastened Republicans are starting to stir. Senator Ted Cruz, a Trump opponent in the 2016 primaries, a Texan who turned tail after the New Yorker insulted his wife and intimated his father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, shows signs of having regrown a vertebrate. He expressed wariness of the tariffs and had the temerity to say at least the obvious—a recession would lead to a GOP drubbing in next year’s midterm elections. Trump’s grip on the GOP is still firm, but like a Communist dictator, a feckless prime minister, or a vain queen, he’ll find it hard to keep.

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