The Similarities Between Trump and Musk Tearing America Apart and What Mao Did to China in the Cultural Revolution
We begin with the similarities between Trump and Musk tearing the American system apart and what Mao Zedong did to China in the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1960’s. Not only did Mao dismantle the government and purge its expertise using young Red Guard fanatics not unlike Musk’s teenage techies, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao promoted a semi literate peasant as his vice premier and a low-level factory worker at a textile mill to be his deputy which has echoes of Trump’s fool’s gallery of Hegseth, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. Joining us is Orville Schell, who was formerly the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and currently is the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.- China Relations. His books include Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders and Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century. We discuss his article at Project Syndicate, “Trump’s cultural revolution: Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness.”
An Assessment on How Much the Musk Assault on Government is Performative as Our Reality TV President Governs By Stunt
Then we assess how much the Musk assault on the government is performative given that we have a reality TV president performing government by stunt which can turn on a dime if the reviews are bad as happened today with the tariffs against Mexico and the US auto industry being reversed. Joining us is Andy Kroll, a reporter for ProPublica covering voting, elections and other democracy issues. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone and a senior reporter at Mother Jones, where his work on self-dealing during the first Trump presidency sparked multiple congressional investigations. He is the author of A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, and we discuss his latest article at ProPublica, “How DOGE’s Cuts to the IRS Threaten to Cost More Than DOGE Will Ever Save.”