I almost fell out of my seat when on Thursday I opened the South China Morning Post to find a column by Alex Lo asking: “Is Donald Trump the real-life Manchurian candidate?” Only the day before had I watched the 2004 film The Manchurian Candidate and found myself asking that exact same question. It seems the entire US political system has suddenly, and dangerously, gone weird on us.
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Dozens of the most meticulous, measured and fact-focused journalists and economists that I have followed, trusted and admired for decades seem suddenly lost for words – at least civilised words – at the breathtaking spectacle of a once-rational Republican Party morphing into a machete-wielding rogue for which lifetime allies have suddenly become enemies, and long-time enemies become trusted friends.
At the Financial Times, Edward Luce described the US president’s 100-minute Congress address as “a fever dream of extravagant promises”; Gideon Rachman said the “most positive verdict I heard on the speech” by US Vice-President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference “was that it was ‘puerile bullshit’”. Martin Wolf calls Trump’s tariffs “an act of unjustifiable, indeed economically illiterate, economic warfare”; Maurice Obstfeld sums it all up as “chainsaw theatrics”.
For those of us in Asia, the fevered antics of Trump and his eccentric team also bear an uncanny resemblance to Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four back in 1966 launching the Cultural Revolution.
They are even using language that smells suspiciously of that dark Chinese decade. Take the 2025 Trade Policy Agenda recently released by US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, a report which opens with: “The United States of America is the most extraordinary nation the world has ever known.” Noting America’s goods trade deficit had soared to over a trillion dollars, the report said: “President Trump alone recognised the role that trade policy has played in creating these challenges and how trade policy can fix them.”
In his address to Congress, Trump spoke of “the dawn of the golden age of America” and of “action to usher in the greatest and most successful era of our country”. He also proclaimed America “on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again”. It may not quite be the rhetoric of China’s “Great Helmsman” and his Little Red Book, but it is not many steps behind – and may prove just as naive.
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