Donald Trump: The true 'Monkey King'?

Why do US elites, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and academics all hate Trump? This is like in the 1930s, when the Nationalist government based in Nanjing and Shanghai detested Mao Zedong.

Trump is a New York property tycoon who prospered through his father's favour. His speech is coarse, his taste is common, but he succeeded in business from scratch. And as a businessman - at the bottom of the ancient Chinese pecking order of scholars, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants - he has a sense of being discriminated against by the US elites or scholars at the top as such a hierarchy is also somewhat applicable in US society.

Furthermore, after the war, the Democrats and Republicans split the benefits of governance among the US top echelons: after the decline of the Kennedy family, there was the Bush family, and then the Clintons, and there were hints that Obama also thought of getting his wife into the White House. Wall Street, the IT sector, the White House elites, all thought of US interests as a package with national security, which they sold indiscriminately to foreign groups, including China.

To this huge group of nouveau riche bourgeois, Trump is like Mao Zedong coming down from Jinggang Mountain, walking into the function room of a hotel on the Bund in Shanghai, sitting down at a table set for a Western meal, still dressed in his smelly clothes and straw sandals from Yan'an.

Of course, Trump is not Mao. No, his background and wealth cannot be compared to the farmer leader from Hunan. But that is what is so strange: Trump, as a tycoon, wants to lead American workers in flipping the rules established by the US elites on both coasts, and truly put America first and redistribute the benefits.

Of course, Trump is definitely not a socialist; he hates socialism. He is complex because he sees that socialists have also made it into elite bourgeois groups. Clinton and Obama opened the gates to illegal immigration and attracted grassroots votes, and tried to change the ethnic complexion of the US, and the US constitution and intentions established by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The strange thing is, Trump is a businessman himself and the American workers and farmers that he is leading are Scottish, Irish and European immigrants who have been coming to the US for the past 200 years. If others who were immigrants accept immigration as a core value of American society, Trump would certainly accept it as well. But the construction of a US border wall sends a clear signal that he sees through the hypocritical behaviour of the Clinton and Obama gang. That is, falsely welcoming illegal immigrants and the poor and having them form the bedrock of their voter base, then using their pretentious love and acceptance as smokescreens to secure votes while permanently consolidating their privileged positions in the upper echelons of society for generations to come.

This is why the situation in the US is so complex: while Clinton, Obama, and Biden are leftists, they are also rightists to some extent. And while Trump may seem to be far-right, he is actually far-left. The crux of the matter lies in redefining left and right according to the US's reality.

The one who is in the most awkward position is Bernie Sanders, who is a true socialist. Sanders is different from Obama and Biden as he truly believes that the world belongs to the people. He wants to destroy Wall Street's financial hegemony, and ensure that the homeless people in New York and Los Angeles get their share of potatoes or rice as well. But if Sanders were to run as a Democratic presidential candidate, Obama and Clinton would be finished too. To them, Sander's party platform is something that they pretend to love but really fear.

To understand the present state of chaos in the US, you have to first understand the deep-seated structural malaise of US society, and the hypocrisy and arrogance of the American central and west coast elites.

Only then can you get to know Trump, who is almost like Jack Nicholson's character in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He is the disruptor of the system, and America's "Monkey King" (Sun Wukong). Trump is a true revolutionary leader. He promises to bring the rest of the world down with him if need be and tears down existing structures, replacing them with the radically new. Just that in such an absurd society as the US, his image and how he packages himself is all rather out of place and leaves people outside of the US befuddled.

This article was first published in Chinese on CUP media as "重新定左右".

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