Contra Trump

In this chapter of Contra Trump, a series devoted to the second presidential term of Donald J Trump and its resonance with Xi Jinping’s China, we mark the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence in the company of Timothy D. Snyder, historian and author in 2016 of the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

We featured Professor Snyder’s work in an earlier chapter of Contra Trump titled Twenty Lessons for a Nation Sleepwalking into Autocracy. Timothy Snyder released the following video on 4 July 2026. In it, he is joined by prominent American cultural figures as they revisit the twenty lessons in On Tyranny in the context of America today:

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Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium was launched in November 2024, following Donald Trump’s second electoral victory. In its chapters, we refer both to Xi Jinping’s China and to Trump’s America as ‘empires of tedium’. That is to say, regardless of their formidable strengths, be they overlapping or contrasting, the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America are in a circuit of history from which they both may, eventually, grow out of or escape from. To achieve that velocity of positive change requires the painstaking and tiresome work of facing the tedious realities of the past and the crippling realities of the present. For those mindful of American and Chinese socio-political change over the past sixty years, the recidivism of the 2020s is tedious, troubling and tenebrous. In both cases, the inevitable biological attrition that faces their respective ‘Great Men’ may promise a brighter future. Or not.

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For students of China, the main audience of China Heritage, we would point out that the inhabitants of the People’s Republic first learned the twenty lessons of tyranny in the early 1950s. It was a drawn-out, painful and scarifying process that dominated the country for three decades. Following a period of moderate, and limited, recovery, from 1978 to 2008, new generations would learn the same old lessons, outlined below by Timothy Snyder and his collaborators below. Few have been left unscathed.

For the New China Experts — including statistic-obsessed academics and podcasters — the old lessons remain relevant to a China that is the world’s first mature and prosperous fascist state (see We Need to Talk About Totalitarianism, Again).

If China is indeed the ‘model of modernity in the twenty-first century’, as some China mavens claim, then they should be able to seamlessly accommodate themselves to the tyranny of Trump’s America. After all its appeal to a socio-political monoculture would impose a regime of Gleichschaltung, the ‘leaning in’ or ‘synchronising’ of the individual with the will of the state, something that marked the fascist regimes of the past and that is exemplified in the Xi Jinping era by the Communist Party’s 360 degree, 24/7 emphasis on its unquestioned role in the nation’s life.

‘One Leader, One Party, One Race’ is the clarion call of the Xi Jinping era. What’s not to get?

Meanwhile, the democracy on Taiwan is disparaged, overlooked or treated as little more than a historical encumbrance that needs to be ‘resolved’.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
4 July 2026

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Related Material:

• The Fourth of July 2026
• The Dotard State on Donald J. Trump’s Eightieth Birthday
• June Fourth 2026 — Seeds of Fire, the Substrate and the Longest Relay
• The Unhomed — Mourning in the Future Tense
• Twenty Lessons for a Nation Sleepwalking into Autocracy
• Dwell not in a Country that is in Turmoil — an Historian’s Warning
• Trump’s Inauguration — Can we call it fascism yet?

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See also:

• T2 — two months, twenty-two cartoons

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