Trump, An Avowed Central Planner, Is A Mao-Style Communist

By Jacob Weindling | August 13, 2025 | 11:07am

Photo by PAS China

Economy Donald Trump

Trump, An Avowed Central Planner, Is A Mao-Style Communist

It’s practically impossible to classify Donald Trump’s core economic policy of central planning as capitalist. Sure, he is pro-capitalism in that he wants to allow oil companies to drill into your head to find their black gold if need be, and like most of our depraved capitalists buying our politics off while aligning themselves with a communist, believes that regulations need not exist. But the key aspect of Trump’s economic agenda–that he gets to plan who is say, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist or Intel’s CEO and which companies have to pay extra taxes just to sell their product here and which don’t–is deeply Maoist. No MAGAchud in the comments would deny it if President Bernie Sanders was doing the same thing.

The Soviet Union is perhaps the most famed centrally planned economy of the modern era, but China, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos all have some aspects of central planning while opening their markets up to private capital, and the United States under Trump is following a similar model. That’s not me saying it. That’s The Wall Street Journal detailing how “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics.” Trump plans the economy, like trying to force us from an import-driven economy to an export-driven one, and if General Motors has to take a 35 percent hit to its net income because of Trump’s central planning, so be it.

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This kind of policy trends towards communism. Fascist states like Germany and Italy of the 1930s and 40s had some central planning, but active management of the economy is nowhere near as intrinsic to fascism as it is to communism and socialism. Trump obviously is opposed to the more egalitarian aspects of communism where some of the state is centrally planned around the people’s demands, and his vision of central planning is predicated on his own demand. America built the most powerful economy in history while importing more cheap goods than anyone ever has, but Trump likes to think he can turn the tides of history and run back the Industrial Revolution. He has been very open about how he is willing to slow down the economy in order to centrally plan it around his long-term vision of something it is not and hasn’t been in over a century. This is communism!

Perhaps the closest comparison for the Republican Party’s stated desire to radically change America is the Maoist Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong wanted to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist elements from society, and after a decade of strife, it resulted in untold misery, at least a million dead and the loss of countless Chinese cultural heritage. Mao waged a war on bourgeois elements he alleged had infiltrated the government in an attempt to institute capitalism, and he wanted to ensure that his cultural and political vision of Chinese communism permeated every aspect of society. Flip capitalism and communism around, and this is the explicit thing Trump says he wants to do. The problem is, he is so clearly not a capitalist.

Trump is attempting to enforce his cultural revolution through levers of the government. His FCC Chair Brendan Carr has said he would cite DEI as a basis to block business mergers. Paramount settled a spurious lawsuit, then killed 60 Minutes and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to satisfy dear leaders’ whims so his FCC would approve their merger with Skydance. Again, I ask “conservatives,” imagine the world where Bernie Sanders is demanding a new CEO to serve atop the 113th largest company in the S&P 500 while blocking mergers over cultural qualms. What would you call that?

It’s Maoism! Trump is a communist! This is not some random lefty hot take. The Wall Street Journal is using a type of communism, capitalism wholly directed by the state, to describe Trump’s economy. Axios is writing titles like “Trump the central planner” while using an image of a not-so-subtle red and yellow Chinese-style flag with the dollar sign replacing the golden stars. Fortune is asking “Is MAGA going Marxist and Maoist?” The conservative American Enterprise Institute is citing Nobel laureate Austrian economists to claim that “Trump’s Attempt at Central Planning Threatens America’s Economic Ecosystem.” This is very straightforward stuff you could teach a political science 101 student in a week.

‘But Jacob, you are a Bernie Bro, don’t you like central planning and communism?’

No! Socialism is not communism, as demonstrated by the fact that there is nothing called market communism, but my preferred ideology of market socialism exists to varying degrees around the world. You can have a market economy while still adding democratic socialist elements to it. The simplest way you can delineate between ideologies like market socialism and communism is that under market socialism, you could theoretically have a private company board 50 percent filled with labor representatives, while in communism, there are no private companies and that number is 100 percent and those representatives are whoever the government says they are. In America’s case, that representative is Donald Trump.

American Eagle’s foot traffic declining 9 percent after Sydney Sweeney’s milquetoast wink to our present white nationalist political moment with “good genes” is not the demand-driven world Trump wants to live in. He wants to mandate that everyone should buy American Eagle jeans after a fake right-wing panic is whipped up around an ad that literally no one in my very lefty Bluesky feed was complaining about. This is Maoism. It’s a cultural revolution being imposed on every single front, especially economic ones.

If Trump really was a free market capitalist, he would not impose the largest tariff regime since 1934. Bernie Sanders’ tariffs in his 2020 platform weren’t anywhere near as expansive and aggressive as Trump’s, and Sanders’ central planning in his trade policy centered around improving labor conditions and climate outcomes. Trump’s style of central planning is releasing an Executive Order mandating that everyone buy Hulk Hogan’s shitty beer while he slaps 10,000 percent tariffs on Guiness because Ireland’s president made him sad.

Trump obviously doesn’t have enough depth to be characterized with any kind of ideology. Having one requires thinking about who you are and what you value, the kind of nuanced introspection Trump is constitutionally incapable of. He is pure id, a deeply American figure representing the worst of our shortsighted and self-destructive impulses. Trump’s only ideology is whatever benefits Trump, and he clearly sees central planning as perhaps the core policy in his toolkit, which makes him more of a communist than anything. Congrats MAGA, you’re a bunch of raging commies, so says both this proud socialist and the Wall Street Journal.