For instance, have you been following the case of Trump’s decision to deport Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador despite a judge’s order that the plane not take off or, if it had already, that it be ordered to turn around?
Trump ordered the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members in US to a prison in El Salvador.Credit: El Salvador PPO via AP
The administration chose to ignore the ruling. White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, said: “It is without doubt the most unlawful order a judge has issued in our lifetimes.” So it’s now the president and his staff who decide which court orders are legal, apparently.
Second, the concept of “universal values” is forbidden. Xi regards human rights as a challenge to the rule of the party. And Trump? “The concept that everyone is equal is undermined by the administration’s attack on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] policies,” says Barme, who has been writing on the growing convergence of US and Chinese values since 2017 on China Heritage.
“They’re saying, ‘we don’t want diversity, we want a monoculture, we don’t want equity because we think some people are more valuable than others’. Trump is basically pursuing a massive re-segregation by race, class, wealth and values.”
Xi’s third taboo is “civil society”, which Document No. 9 describes as a “serious form of political opposition”. The party bans or strictly regulates any effort at citizens’ organising for a shared purpose, whether it’s a charity, trade union or environmental NGO, or spiritual group such as Falun Dafa.
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Trump seeks to delegitimise and halt civil society movements with which he disagrees. Trump’s defence secretary in 2020, Mark Esper, has written that Trump asked him to order troops to fire into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Trump pardoned more than 1000 people convicted of invading and vandalising the Capitol on January 6, but says people vandalising Tesla cars will be branded “domestic terrorists” by his administration, opening the prospect of severe punishments. “That’s incredibly familiar territory,” says Barme, citing China’s use of the term “subverting state power” to crush protest movements.
China’s fourth “unmentionable” is neoliberalism – because it’s an idea that undermines state control of the economy by advocating full and free rein of market forces.
Similarly, Trump is leading a retreat from US neoliberalism by applying new tariffs. He is a mercantilist who believes that government should engineer positive trade balances through market intervention.
The fifth is independent journalism. China’s censorship and propaganda machinery is notorious for quashing independent reporting and debate. Xi has said that all media outlets in China share the same family name – “the Party”.
In the US, Trump recently gave a speech at the Department of Justice where he said that CNN and MSNBC were “illegal, what they do is illegal” and “has to stop”. Their crime? They “literally write 97.6 per cent bad about me”. Separately, Trump sues media outlets whose coverage he dislikes. ABC News settled by paying him $US15 million. He’s demanding $US20 billion in damages from CBS for the way 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris interview.
America is becoming more like China. At a remarkable rate.Credit: Michael Howard
Trump has threatened to revoke broadcast licences and jail journalists. Under Trump, the Federal Communications Commission has launched multiple investigations into media outlets for “falsification” of information.
China’s sixth taboo is what Xi calls “historical nihilism”. This is aimed at curbing honest accounting for the Party’s previous mistakes such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Criticism of the Party’s past could undermine opinion of the Party’s present, he fears.
Barme says that a showcase of the Trumpian equivalent is his opposition to The New York Times′ 1619 Project, which reframed US history around the experience of slaves. Trump set up a committee in rebuttal, the 1776 Committee. He favours revisionist histories of the Confederacy, slavery and the Civil War.
The final taboo is against any effort to challenge “reform and opening” as defined by Xi. Barme finds its analogue in Trump’s intolerance for criticism of his executive orders.
The US, of course, remains vastly freer and more contested a society than the People’s Republic. But after a mere two months into Trump’s current term, the trends are all China’s way, seven for seven.
It’s growing harder by the day for Australia and other US allies to claim “shared values” with America under Trump.
