[POST] Trump's Year Zero Approach: When a Nation Rewrites Its Own History
Journey down the MAGA memory hole with me
This is a reader-supported publication. I give it all away for free but could really use your support if you want me to keep doing this.
Political “Year Zero”: The term is used to describe a radical political event that aims to completely erase the past and start a new society.
Cambodia’s “Year Zero”: This is the most famous example, referring to the start of the Khmer Rouge’s rule in Cambodia in 1975. The regime sought to destroy all pre-revolutionary history and culture, including books, schools, and factories.
GOOGLE.AI
America has never truly been in danger of collapse engineered by others, but it has frequently suffered the danger of collapse by its own hand. It is no accident that many critical analyses of the Trump administration’s campaign to recast American politics and foreign policy portray our current national trajectory as a form of “suicide” or own-goal BREXIT-ing of an international order of our creating. Both descriptions strike me as entirely valid and far from alarmist.
There is this unsettling sense of America standing at a crossroads. Not the familiar crossroads of elections and policy debates, but a profound pivot—an existential reconfiguration of what government means, how truth is constructed, and the boundaries of power itself. Trump’s profoundly nihilistic instinct to destroy everything and anything not of his own making is truly Hitlerian, Stalinist, and Maoist, which makes his return to power all the more baffling—one can imagine—to any objective future historian.
From America’s New Map:
Modern political science began with the question, Why did Germany’s Weimar Republic fail in the 1920s, ultimately fueling both Nazi fascism and the Second World War? How did such a sophisticated political design succumb so completely to dark forces suddenly beyond its control? Recall that Adolf Hitler pegged an imagined global cabal of Jewish financiers as determined to enslave and ultimately destroy the German people and their way of life.
Future historians may well ask similar questions about America—as in, Why did the world’s most successful and robust democracy fail in the 2020s? How did modern globalization’s progenitor and longtime defender suddenly succumb so completely to such anti-democratic impulses? Why did this nation choose to demonize and sabotage its wildly successful creation?
When I wrote those sentences at the start of 2023, my fears remained abstract. But, as of today, such concerns are no mere conjecture. They’re happening now, under the policies enacted by President Trump, whose administration is reshaping the very fabric of the American state on a scale and at a speed that echoes the most radical moments in the history of authoritarian regimes.
As with any turn toward authoritarianism, there is this back-to-the-future vibe that promises, if we can only turn back time, we can achieve some preemptive fix of what’s gone wrong.
From my 2005 book Blueprint for Action:
The odd thing is that as globalization has progressively advanced in its technology and modernization, the rejectionist ideologies have been forced to retreat farther back in time to attempt to build their alternative universes. When Marxism began in the mid-nineteenth century, the assumption was that socialism would naturally be achieved at capitalism’s pinnacle of development, or at the point of the super-abundance of goods. This ideology actually sought to extend the capitalist model of development beyond what were perceived as its logical limits. But since that ideology proved wrong in its diagnosis of capitalism’s weaknesses, it fell to Vladimir Lenin to turn Marx on his head at the start of the twentieth century and argue that socialist revolution was far more likely to succeed in a largely precapitalist society, meaning not industrial Germany but Russia just as it was to approach what would have been its industrial phase of development.
Later in the same century, Lenin’s great ideological successor, Mao Zedong, took this theory farther back in time, arguing that socialist revolutions made even more sense in largely agrarian societies, like China, meaning a revolution led by rural peasants and not by an urban proletariat. Cambodia’s subsequent Khmer Rouge Communist movement later took Mao’s ideology to its logical extreme, not just engaging in “cultural revolution” against largely city-based “enemies of the state” but literally emptying the cities and forcing millions to endure “re-education” (marking the revolutionary Year Zero that would reboot the system completely) and eventual genocide in the most backward rural areas of the country.
Trump, with his war on “wokeism” and DEI, and civil rights in general seeks such a turning-back-of-the-clock—right down to rewriting or censoring American history in all of its public-facing forms.
History tells us that totalitarian regimes seek such a recoding of their societies’ political DNA by controlling every aspect of life, from the flow of information to the structure of institutions and the commonly understood truth itself. Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Nazi Germany—each sought to erase the old normal, replacing it with a new order built upon ideological purity, loyalty, and an unyielding control of narrative.
The Trump administration is executing what is legitimately described as a “year zero” reset on America’s historical truths and governmental data management. This is not a simple rewrite; it’s a forceful reboot aimed at erasing decades of institutional memory around race, equity, and social justice. History, as curated by federal institutions, is being stripped of “divisive” narratives and repackaged to highlight a sanitized, triumphant version of American exceptionalism. Museums and landmarks are purged of inconvenient truths; educational initiatives that push inclusion or critical race theory are defunded or dismantled outright.
The administration’s playbook extends beyond just historical narratives. Federal data—once THE transparent backbone of American governance—is vanishing from public view. Data sets tracking disparities, gender identity, workforce diversity, and social inequities are scrubbed or buried, creating a statistical blackout—Orwell’s memory hole as garbage chute for un-conforming realities. Government websites are edited to erase evidence of systemic issues, limiting the public’s ability to hold power accountable. Symbolically, the renaming of landmarks signals an ideological reclamation, fencing off territory in the cultural landscape. All around, there’s a hollowing out of institutional capacity—jobs cut, agencies downsized—that further weakens the flow of reliable information.
This is a comprehensive, multi-front campaign that doesn’t just shape what Americans think about their past but controls what they can learn—Orwell’s deeper point. It’s an effort to impose a new baseline, a freshly manufactured reality that fits a nationalist vision while making inconvenient facts disappear in the fog of executive power. The challenge going forward is clear: push back on this enforced amnesia or watch the country’s collective memory fracture into curated myth and forgotten truths.
Historically, totalitarian regimes employ a series of core tactics: purging dissent, controlling information, rewriting history, and mobilizing loyalty through fear and propaganda. These steps are designed to eliminate kernels of resistance and establish a monolithic control architecture.
President Trump’s government overhaul resembles these tactics in key ways. His administration has engaged in a purge of bureaucrats deemed disloyal, replacing experts with ideological loyalists—parallel to regime purges under Stalin or Mao. Think of the firing of civil servants and the undermining of independent agencies: these are attempts to dismantle the institutional checks that once served as a bulwark against authoritarian overreach.
Furthermore, Trump’s relentless claim that government data and facts are “rigged,” “fake,” or manipulated, echoes regimes that have monopolized truth to maintain power. Control over information becomes a tool for shaping social realities—a tactic famously employed by the Nazis and Soviets. Here, truth is reframed as a political weapon, with “alternative facts” bent to serve the narrative of loyalty and ideological purity.
The radical reshaping of government agencies—a kind of institutional shock therapy—is akin to carving out a new reality. The regime’s aim is to reframe the social contract, to forge allegiance through loyalty tests and enforced narratives, rather than through tradition or shared values—things about which we Americans no longer seem to share commonly recognized definitions.
So, what can history teach us about these disturbing parallels?
The regimes that successfully rewrote their societies often did so through systematic control, energetic purges, and reliance on ideological narratives. The Nazi regime transformed societal institutions to serve its racial and territorial ambitions, engaging in relentless propaganda, surveillance, and repression—an insidious process of erasing social truths and replacing them with an official ideology.
Likewise, Stalin’s USSR actively rewrote history, airbrushing leaders, rewriting textbooks, and controlling the flow of information to create a single, unchallengeable narrative. These tactics were aimed not merely at governance, but at the very conception of what “truth” implied within society— you know, like when O’Brien convinces Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four that two plus two actually equals five.
We will endure a great deal of these forced feedings from the Trump administration concerning next year’s 250th anniversary of 1776.
To navigate this environment, strategic visualization becomes critical: scenarios illustrating how this systemic transformation might unfold. Think of a future where government data becomes a tool for control rather than truth, where institutions serve loyalty more than competence, and where the social contract is redefined within an authoritarian logic set. Such visual maps allow the political opposition to anticipate these trajectories and adjust our resistance accordingly, transforming potential crises into opportunities for stabilizing the political order against such assaults on its integrity.
It’s not just today that’s at-risk here but entire generations. History makes clear: when regimes pursue totalitarian tactics—regardless of their ideological veneer—they cast long shadows over societies. The danger lies in our passivity in the face of these tactics, normalizing the erasure of complex truths, and accepting the concentration of power as inevitable.
The paradox of totalitarian regimes is that they depend on the orderly chaos of “disorder”: purging institutions, rewriting history, and controlling information to create a preferred social reality. This process is a form of systemic violence disguised as reform or patriotism, but rooted in the core tactics of erasing previous norms and consolidating power.
In our case, the ongoing reforms under Trump resemble this pattern: institution-by-institution, narrative-by-narrative, reshaping the social landscape toward a new, loyalty-based normal. The question for all of us is whether these efforts are temporary disorder or the prelude to a new, unequal equilibrium—an American Apartheid as I call it in America’s New Map.
What scares me most right now about that potential future pathway? Our Supreme Court seems just fine with it—this blithe leaving-it-to-the-states attitude that strikes me as only guaranteeing more fracturing of the body politic.
Calmly visualizing the future as a battlefield of possibilities is today of the utmost importance. The challenge—especially for strategic thinkers and policymakers—is to craft clear visual narratives that decode the chaos, reveal the systemic patterns, and enable society to navigate this turbulence without surrendering to chaos-inducing shocks—the Trump weapon of choice. The future depends on our collective ability to visualize, understand, and act within this complex landscape—an endeavor that begins with clear eyes, a brave imagination, and the willingness to confront uncomfortable truths immediately upon their emergence.
Because they most definitely are emerging right now.
