Five Ways Trump is making America Look More Like China
By
Wendy Liu
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September 7, 2025
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One rationale behind the United States’ decades of a wide range of engagement with China, from trade to technology and from education to culture, was to encourage China in its reforms and liberalization so that one day the socialist one-party Middle Kingdom would become more like America.
In many ways, however, instead of China becoming more like America, America is, increasingly these days, becoming more like China. Here are five ways.
1. Trump leads in everything
In China, the saying is that the Communist Party leads in everything. At the top of the party is Xi Jinping, general secretary of its central committee. However, Xi is part of the seven-member Standing Committee of a 24-member Politburo and works through a consensus in making the country’s most important policy decisions.
In this sense, President Trump has outdone Xi Jinping, especially in his capricious authoritarian style. Trump doesn’t need any committee or anybody to sign hundreds of his executive orders or make any kind of an announcement such as raising tariffs on all America’s trading partners; firing inspectors general or heads of Labor Statistics or the CDC, shutting down Voice of America and USAID, gutting FEMA, dismantling the Department of Education; attacking the Fed; threatening law firms, judges, media organizations, universities, even non-profits with funding cuts and lawsuits; ordering National Guard troops to LA, DC as law enforcement; suggesting that Coca-Cola use cane sugar and that the Washington Commanders change their name back to the “Redskins,” or Cracker Barrel keep its old logo. So, in America, Trump leads in everything.
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https://www.postalley.org/2025/09/07/five-ways-trump-is-making-america-look-more-like-china/