There is a strange similarity of thinking between Trump’s tariff-driven bid to “restore” U.S. manufacturing and Mao Zedong’s ill-fated Great Leap Forward (1958-62). They do not share an ideology but a method: both are top-down attempts to force economic reality to obey political will. Both confuse production targets with productive capacity, and both underestimate the complexity of modern economies.
Mao believed revolutionary enthusiasm could overcome material constraints. Peasants were ordered to smelt steel in backyard furnaces. Students and intellectuals were forced into the agricultural labor force. Local officials falsified output data to satisfy central planners.
Trump believes tariffs can will factories back into existence. Manufacturing is treated and something that can be restored by punishment rather than rebuilt through skills, capital, and time. The economic feedback of higher prices, retaliation, and supply-chain disruption is dismissed as “temporary pain,” and government statistics are abandoned or downplayed.
Both Mao and Trump made the error of treating economics as a loyalty test rather than a system governed by incentives, information, and tradeoffs.
Central planning and one-size-fits all leads to economic failure as in China under Mao. Trump assumes a national economy can be steered like a single machine rather than a network of adaptive actors. Trump’s tariff policy ignores global supply chains, the capital intensity of modern manufacturing, workforce shortages, and automation which limits job creation even if factories return.
Mao confused symbolic output (unusable slag steel) with real productivity. Agricultural production fell while people starved. Trump celebrates factory openings even as jobs are few, costs are high and firms rely on subsidies and temporary protection. The tariffs advertised to reduce debt instead raise costs and must be doled out as subsidies to make farmers and consumers “whole again.” It’s like getting a face lift then having to get another because the first one makes things worse. The manufacturing that does return ends up being assembly, not high-value production.
Opportunity costs are catastrophic. U.S. manufacturers using imported inputs become less competitive. Retaliatory tariffs harm exporters, especially farmers. The focus is on who is punished rather than on who pays.
When outcomes disappoint, ideology is tightened instead of admitting that mistakes were made and learning from them. Manufacturing ecosystems take decades, not election cycles. Skills, infrastructure, and supplier networks matter more than border taxes. Modern manufacturing is capital intensive and automation heavy thus limiting job recovery. Protection without competitiveness breeds stagnation, not revival. Mao’s Leap failed spectacularly and tragically. Trump’s version fails quietly through higher prices, slower growth, and missed opportunities while preserving the illusion of strength. Unreachable goals are set that never materialize. Instead, lobbyists thrive while corruption, grift and greed benefit rich oligarchs.
Like Mao, Trump believes the economy should obey his narrative. But, economies don’t obey narratives. They respond to incentives, information, institutions and require time. When leaders treat economics as theater rather than ecology, reality eventually intrudes, sometimes brutally, sometimes gradually, but always decisively.
“Tariffs have become a central issue in today’s political and economic debates,” according to Fareed Zakaria. His documentary below “aims to cut through the rhetoric and provide viewers with a clear understanding of how tariffs work, who they help, and who they hurt.”