Trump: America’s reforming hero?

US President Donald Trump’s Great Reset is akin to the systemic reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Gorbachev felt the Soviet socialist system, which had been in place for seventy years, was not working, and the country was stagnating both economically and politically. He proposed perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness/transparency), even at the cost of the Soviet Union’s eventual dissolution.

Trump is undertaking a similarly monumental task in “detoxifying” America: with a national debt of US$36 trillion, the US can no longer afford to endlessly print money to allow its European and Western allies to enjoy the economic bubble, especially as they grow increasingly left-leaning and anti-American — much less fund the rise of communist China on the global stage. Americans need to get grounded — back to the factories, working alongside robots to build an entirely new economic system.

What Trump aims to reform is the dead-end path of illusion and fantasy created by the Democratic Party since the Clinton era. He is cleaning up a colossal mess — a “Sovietised” egalitarianism for the American elite.

The American left-wing media has long skewed its reporting, focusing only on the good and not the bad. While inflation and interest rate figures are accurate, many dark truths are left untold. The media emphasises values like universal love and equality and advocates for the rights of the marginalised — supporting gender transition surgeries for gender dysphoric children in elementary schools, casting a mixed-race actress as Snow White, campaigning for transgender women to join women’s sports teams, and spreading awareness of the #MeToo movement to combat sexual harassment — as being the most progressive in the West.

Yet little is said about the ugliness — how many people are addicted to fentanyl, how many homeless live in major cities, how deeply Chinese money has infiltrated American universities, what I feel to be the growing threat of Islamisation in Europe, or graffiti in New York and London, supermarket and cellphone thefts, or the smell of marijuana in the air.

Just as by the middle of 1976 in mainland China, there was the “fiery era” at the University of Hong Kong with leftist student organisations and Pan Ku Magazine in Hong Kong, so too was the West swept up by leftist sentiment — from scholars like John Fairbank and Han Suyin, to Hollywood celebrities like Shirley MacLaine. They all believed that Mao Zedong’s People’s Communes had solved China’s poverty problem. They took Zhou Enlai at his word: that China had no foreign or internal debt, had developed the atomic bomb, had the Daqing oil field, and had achieved abundance — that China had stood up. Countless fools, after reading Ta Kung Pao and Lee Yee’s magazine The Seventies, also believed it all to be true.

It was not until Hua Guofeng — premier of the People’s Republic of China and Mao’s designated successor — suddenly arrested the Gang of Four after Mao’s death to consolidate his political position, that he revealed he feared the impending collapse of China’s economy. The countless echo chambers around the world were stunned. Could it be that without a complete overhaul, China was doomed? And so, Deng Xiaoping — who had been purged and collectively denounced as the leader of the counter-revolutionary capitalists by 700 million Chinese in factories, communes, and school assemblies — made a comeback and became their great saviour.

Today, Trump is also a great figure who exposes historical lies. Imposing tariffs on 60 countries at once is “shock therapy” born of urgency — much like the drastic measures Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin took to reform Russia’s economy after dismantling the Soviet Union. I think that Gorbachev and Co failed because once people have become addicted to the drug of leftist communism, the aftermath is like Chernobyl’s radioactive ruins — lingering radiation makes it uninhabitable. It is said that chickens hatched there are the size of ostriches, with two or three heads.

Today’s scourge of American “leftist crybabies” (左膠) are just like the remnants of the Gang of Four stubbornly resisting Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. The late Deng Xiaoping, along with Zhao Ziyang, turned many state-owned enterprises into shareholder-based companies, and ordered countless bureaucrats who were “sitting on the toilet without doing their business” (a crude phrase Deng himself used — not something a cultured person like myself would say) to step down and make their own way in the market. In 1979, Hong Kong’s leftist economic circle went through a massive reshuffling, and many old-guard leftists were forced into early retirement.

Trump is even bolder than Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping. Though the Soviet Union dissolved and the transition was painful, Russia did not perish — under Putin, it actually invaded Ukraine. After Mao died, China’s dense, ant-like labour force was unleashed, generating massive power. The People’s Communes disappeared, and China became the world’s factory. Today, it pushes the Belt and Road Initiative, competing with the US for global dominance.

The problem with American intellectuals is this: they naturally believe that Gorbachev was right, because the Soviet system was flawed. But they also believe that today’s American system is perfect, and Gorbachev was a reformer, while Trump is a destroyer.

Yet the Soviet Union was officially called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Now take a look at today’s anti-Trump protesters in the US — the leftist fools marching in demonstrations. They demand to implement socialism. That is, they want tomorrow’s America to become yesterday’s Soviet Union. Anyone with a bit of a brain would see the arrogance and ignorance in this.

The key is whether this generation of Americans — addicted to TikTok, video games, laziness and apathy — can still be woken up. Social media infiltration, extreme atheism leading to moral decay, and the chaos stirred up by radical leftists — it is easy to go from thrift to excess, but not vice versa. Is the US still the same great country from the Eisenhower to Reagan eras that once responded after the attack on Pearl Harbor with dignity and common sense?

Trump’s term is only four years. Insufficient time is a disadvantage. American democracy has long become corrupted. With the promotion of “woke” ideologies like DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and the violence of cancel culture, where is freedom and democracy now? It might as well go all the way — if America must be ruled by a dictatorship, better Trump than the leftist authoritarians. What America needs now is a Lee Kuan Yew to detoxify the nation.

In the 1950s, American manufacturing accounted for 40% of the global total. In 1950 alone, the US produced 100 million tons of steel — half of the world’s output — and 80% of the world’s cars were used in America. Today, all that manufacturing has been hollowed out. The “woke” crowd are preoccupied with debating whether there are 72 or 138 shades of gender between male and female, and if kindergartens should create a third bathroom for transgender children.

Stock market crashing on Wall Street? Let it crash with wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was never worth those sky-high levels in the first place, like the useless senior officials in Hong Kong — how are they worth a monthly salary of HK$300,000 to HK$400,000 (US$38,600 to US$51,480)?

Defeated former Vice-President Kamala Harris jumps at the chance to take a jab: See? You elected this lunatic. I told you so. This is the fate America deserves.

What Harris won’t admit is that she’s a dealer of the political opiates that addicted America to delusion for decades. Fortunately, four years ago, I already predicted on Facebook that the Biden-Harris ticket was designed not to win a second term but to guarantee defeat in four years. You can check the record. I have not deleted a single word of what I wrote.

Protests in multiple cities? Let them protest. America wants socialism? Even their slogans and facial expressions look bizarre. Reports say the next Democratic presidential ticket will be Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Wow, how exciting! Go on, keep going — keep protesting! May all their dreams come true.

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