That theory obviously proved wrong, and a new, darker reality has taken its place: Instead of trying to change the course of Chinese behavior, the United States under President Donald Trump’s leadership has increasingly adopted Beijing’s toolkit. Rather than competing with Beijing, the Trump administration increasingly mimics it. The great irony is that Trump’s “America first” platform—a mix of transactional nationalism, personal loyalty, and state control—is producing an “America with Chinese characteristics.”
Advancing political objectives with coercion
The most visible parallel to Beijing’s model is Trump’s use of state power to achieve political ends. While Beijing punishes trading partners who support Taiwan or question Beijing’s governance and human rights record, the Trump administration uses threats and tariffs to bully friend and foe alike into accepting its demands.
Trump vowed to impose sweeping tariffs—a threat he has since walked back—on eight European countries for their refusal to facilitate the United States’ acquisition of Greenland. This followed months of threats and sanctions on European allies to force compliance on everything from NATO spending to enforcement of their own laws. The president threatened a 100 percent tariff on Canadian goods if Canada strikes a deal with China, attempting to dictate the foreign policy of its allied neighbor. And he invoked dubious emergency powers to slap a 50 percent tariff on Brazil over its trial of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, using trade as a punishment for political grievances. The administration torpedoed a global fee on shipping emissions, mirroring Beijing’s use of its weight to stifle multilateral regulations it dislikes. The result is an erosion of the trust and credibility that once served as the bedrock of American global leadership.
This approach extends to the administration’s domestic agenda, which fuses state and market in a way familiar to leaders in Beijing. The administration threatened to withdraw federal subsidies vital to U.S. competitiveness unless the federal government were granted partial ownership of firms that depend on them. In August, billions of dollars in CHIPS and Science Act grants for Intel were converted into a 10 percent equity stake for the government. Similar stakes were taken in critical minerals companies MP Materials and Trilogy Metals. Trump’s “golden share” in U.S. Steel even gives the government—and Trump—veto power over corporate decisions. The administration also demanded a 15 percent cut from U.S. chipmaker sales to China as the price for granting export licenses and extracted a $100 billion commitment from Apple to invest in the United States.
These actions are not inherently authoritarian; democracies frequently use industrial policy to foster strategic industries. But Trump’s state capitalism is designed to make corporate autonomy conditional on political alignment. By using threats of lawsuits or tariffs, or demanding a cut of profits as leverage, the Trump administration has seemingly pressured companies to give up some of their independence in exchange for favor with the administration. The Trump administration even reportedly assigns loyalty ratings to companies depending on how well they fall in line. The administration appears to be using state levers to reward allies, punish enemies, and exact tribute.
Loyalty first: Politicizing and weaponizing the state
At the heart of the Chinese Communist Party’s model is a demand for absolute fealty from government workers—a pattern that has become increasingly apparent in the United States over the course of this past year. American governance under the Trump administration does not appear to value competence or expertise; it values obedience.
The Schedule Policy/Career initiative (formerly Schedule F) is a significant tool for this transformation, reclassifying thousands of career civil servants as political appointees who can be fired at will. New job postings have featured a “loyalty question” that asks applicants how they would advance the Trump administration’s political agenda if hired. These moves approach China’s cadre system in which all civil servants must demonstrate ideological alignment with the leader. One “Friday night purge” in January saw the firing of at least 17 inspectors general—the watchdogs for federal agencies. Bureaucratic independence appears to be collapsing, and the civil service is being remade to serve a political agenda, not the people.
Justice is no longer blind; it is a political weapon. Trump has openly called for the U.S. court system to be more like China’s, and inquiries opened against Trump’s political opponents are copious. For example, following attacks from Trump, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert resigned after expressing concerns about a lack of evidence to prosecute the administration’s critics. He was replaced by one of Trump’s personal lawyers—an appointment a federal judge later ruled unlawful. This embodies the transformation of rule of law into rule by law, a system championed by Project 2025, where the law functions not as a shield for the innocent, but as a sword against the disloyal.
Even the military has been tested. Since February, the administration has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr., top military lawyers, and more than two dozen generals and admirals. These purges signal a new standard for public service: loyalty to the president and political alignment with the administration. This mirrors Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaigns within the Chinese military, where charges of violating party discipline are frequently used as a pretext to purge officers deemed insufficiently loyal. When Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and his colleagues reminded troops of their duty to disobey illegal orders, Trump labeled the message “sedition … punishable by death.” Meanwhile, thousands of National Guard troops have been deployed to cities such as Los Angeles and Washington to “quell violence” and support deportation efforts, mirroring China’s model, where the military defends a political ideology—that of the Chinese Communist Party in China—rather than the nation.
Ideological warfare: Social, information, and educational control
Like Beijing, the Trump administration pursues coercive policies wrapped in the language of patriotism. Mirroring Beijing’s digital authoritarianism, U.S. border agents are now enforcing ideological conformity by detaining and barring travelers—from researchers to students—based on “subversive” private texts and political memes found during invasive device searches. This surge in digital repression transforms the border into a political checkpoint where dissent is treated as a national security threat.
By relentlessly attacking the press as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” the Trump administration achieves the same effect as China’s state censorship. The goal does not appear to be winning the argument, but destroying the idea of a shared, verifiable reality and centralizing truth into a single leader. This has escalated from rhetoric to policy, with the Pentagon recently demanding as a condition of access that reporters sign a pledge not to gather information not authorized for release.
When the press is discredited, the state can replace information with propaganda. The administration’s Patriotic Education Initiative mirrors China’s ideological curriculum. This has been paired with attacks and funding cuts to universities such as Harvard and Columbia for perceived political noncompliance. If the facts themselves are inconvenient, they are simply erased. Examples of this approach include the removal of the national climate assessments from government websites and in the firing of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner for releasing grim jobs and inflation data. Attack the messengers, then attack the facts themselves.
Conclusion
The Trump administration is learning the worst lessons from Beijing—lessons about the use of state power for extortion, the demand for absolute fealty, and the control of information and ideas. Critics may dismiss this as alarmist, arguing that American institutions are too robust to succumb to foreign-style authoritarianism. But institutions are only as strong as the people who protect them, and those people are being purged. America may find that in its frantic effort to beat China, it has become the very thing it sought to defeat—a tragedy for the future of global democracy.
To thrive in this defining era, America must offer the world a compelling alternative to authoritarianism, not a chaotic imitation of it. If the administration hollows out the democratic values that drive the nation’s innovation and alliances, it will not only lose the fundamental idea of America—it will validate the authoritarian wager that democracy does not work.