Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump defiled one of the oldest and most sacrosanct pillars of the American project.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, he said that he simply wasn’t sure if non-U.S. citizens are protected by the right of due process under the country’s Fifth Amendment, as numerous Supreme Court rulings have guaranteed. When asked if he has to “uphold the Constitution,” Trump replied, “I don’t know.”
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump defiled one of the oldest and most sacrosanct pillars of the American project.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, he said that he simply wasn’t sure if non-U.S. citizens are protected by the right of due process under the country’s Fifth Amendment, as numerous Supreme Court rulings have guaranteed. When asked if he has to “uphold the Constitution,” Trump replied, “I don’t know.”
It is a measure of how steeply U.S. political culture has deteriorated during Trump’s mere 100-plus days in office that such an outrage can feel like ancient history less than a week later. That is not only because Americans are being assailed by breaks with precedent, tradition, or the law on a near-daily basis. They are also becoming numbed.
Each new spate of willfully provocative departures from the past has the effect of anesthesia, desensitizing the public to the outrages that preceded them. (Just two days before his comments on due process, Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated photo of himself as a pope in full regalia on social media.)
Since the NBC interview, Trump has told Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, that only “time will tell” whether the United States can annex its neighbor against its will; boasted that Washington has no need of other countries’ markets; and insisted baselessly that tariffs are saving the country money. Lesser instances of foolishness include a proposal to place a 100 percent tax on foreign movies and a nostalgic suggestion that the Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay be reopened.
After Trump’s reelection, as he tapped manifestly unqualified people to fill his cabinet, I warned in a column that his second term was setting the country up for nothing short of a cultural revolution like that of China. At the time, some readers found this extreme. Since the U.S. president took office, though, many others have drawn the same analogy, comparing the new Trump era with Mao Zedong’s final decade in power from 1966 to 1976. This period began with a bid to whip up protests against the state as a way to eliminate impediments to Mao’s personal power and quickly became devastating—and deadly—in its chaos.
Those most skeptical of calling the present moment a cultural revolution have shared with me their disbelief that the United States could be on the path toward a violent civil war—or that Trump and his most zealous supporters would openly encourage armed attacks on their critics, as Mao’s close underlings in the so-called Gang of Four did.
I find more insurrectionist tactics by Trump hard to rule out after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But predicting a U.S. civil war was never the main point in drawing this parallel. The idea was that the new administration is waging a broad and energetic—though it often seems haphazard—campaign to dismantle the U.S. system: the constitutional limits on executive power, the essential place of civil society, and even freedoms of the press and expression. Today, who but the most committed Trump partisans seriously doubt this?
As Trump’s second term unfolds, however, it is the contrasts rather than the similarities that have grown sharper between the United States’ experience of his power—with his innate disorganization, willful mischief, vindictiveness, and groundless self-certainty—and China’s suffering under Mao.
The U.S. and Chinese systems were, of course, fundamentally different from the start. The United States is, by law, an electoral democracy; China, by its own design and acknowledgment, is an authoritarian dictatorship led by the Chinese Communist Party.
One of the most remarkable things about China’s experience during the Cultural Revolution, though, is how quickly its vaunted centralized authority crumbled. Although many millions of Chinese people exalted Mao like a demigod, even he was rendered nearly powerless to control what he had unleashed.
When I asked Andrew Walder, a professor of sociology at Stanford University and expert on the Cultural Revolution, about whether we should compare that period with the present-day United States, he responded in an email: “There was remarkably little resistance to the unfolding CR in 1966—’67. In fact, the state structure collapsed from within, as rank and file bureaucrats overthrew their bosses.”
In a phone conversation that followed, Walder added that what distinguishes the United States is that “we have the most advanced 18th-century design for a political system in the world. The founders put sand in the gears of the system at every level, and this has been very effective [in preventing unchecked presidential power].”
Recent weeks have shown many signs of this. Maine Gov. Janet Mills defied Trump over policies on transgender athletes and successfully pushed back against his administration’s vindictive efforts to cut funding to education in her state. A federal judge recently barred Trump from punishing a big law firm for representing people and causes he opposes. Even conservative judges have issued decisions condemning Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants.
By itself, the U.S. judiciary will not be enough to prevent Trump from wreaking devastating and fundamental damage on the country’s political system. After all, he still has most of his term ahead of him and hardly seems chastened.
I may not be as optimistic about the resilience of the country’s democracy as Walder seems to be, but I am also not so utterly pessimistic as to believe that all will fall apart in the United States, as happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.
To say that much depends on the Republican Party is not to indulge in partisanship. It is an objective fact that very few Republicans in Congress—or indeed in the party itself—have shown much inclination to defend the long-standing political norms that have come under attack by Trump, much less criticize him directly.
Without a Congress willing to play a vigorous role in checking presidential power, over time, the courts will likely be too weak to defend Washington’s constitutional system and the democratic rule that it enables.
Many Americans hold out hope that Democratic Party successes in the 2026 midterm elections may effectively rein in Trump. This is not a foregone conclusion, though. As with all elections, results cannot be guaranteed. And given Trump’s dishonest claims about past elections, even the darkest scenarios are hard to rule out. Will there be elections at all? If so, will they be free and fair? Would Trump, who has shown an inclination to disregard the courts, respect the will of an opposition-led Congress? Americans are unaccustomed to such fundamental doubts about their system, but they would be wise to consider them.
Still, Walder was right about sand in the gears being part of the Founding Fathers’ design. This can be felt in the working of states, which retain considerable autonomy and can summon resources of their own to defend democratic life and resist despotic urges from the White House.
The ultimate rampart, though, may be public opinion. This is something that was less important in Maoist China or even the China of today, because the state tightly controls information and offers the public little opportunity to openly second-guess official policies. According to opinion polling, Trump currently has the lowest popular support of any U.S. leader in the past 80 years—and approval ratings tend to go down, not up, after the honeymoon period that follows inaugurations.
It will ultimately be for the American people to decide how much they cherish the democracy they have built over generations. And as disturbing as it is to see that roughly 40 percent of the population still supports Trump despite his repeated disregard for the system designed by the country’s founders, that figure suggests that an even larger number of Americans still care enough about its preservation to insist on it.
