It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like F This — Randy Rainbow’s 2025 Xmas Gift

Contra Trump

北風那個吹  雪花那個飄

On 1 January 2024, China Heritage published Nutbush City Limits — 2024, Mao, Trump and China Heritage to mark what promised to be a momentous year in US and global politics. In it, we featured a reprint of A Monkey King’s Journey to the East, the meditation on Donald J. Trump and Mao Zedong with which we launched China Heritage on 1 January 2017. We also returned to the themes of Spectres & Souls, China Heritage Annual 2021, the subtitle of which was ‘Vignettes, moments and meditations on China and America, 1861-2021’.

Over the years, a recurring topic in our work has been the right to know and the need to lampoon. On Halloween 2024, we joined Randy Rainbow, one of America’s most artful political satirists, to mark the crescendo of the US presidential election cycle. Randy took as his theme Xanadu, Olivia Newton-John’s 1980 hit song, recast as MAGADU, the theme song of a country ruled over by MAGA, Make-America-Great-Again Republicans, ‘a place where nobody wants to go’.

Halloween 2024, 31 October 2024, also marked the beginning of Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium, a series launched In anticipation of Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House. A year later, in December 2025, we mark Yuletide 2025 with another work by Randy Rainbow, titled It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like F This:

***

See also:

***

From its launch in 2024, Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium has been ‘in dialogue’ with Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, a project that has tracked the Xi Jinping era from its prehistory. In Chinese, I refer to both of these ‘empires’ as 無奈江山, realms where, for us, the theme is summed up in the expression ‘Hope, then? Hope forlorn’ (see 無可奈何 — So It Goes). We use 無奈 wúnài — an expression that can be translated as ‘it is what it is’ — in reference to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s remark that:

I shall not live to see the future, but I am haunted by the fear that it may be only a slightly modified version of the past.

As Clive James observed about Mandelstam’s autobiographical work:

Hope Against Hope is about a gradual, reluctant but inexorable realization that despair is the only thing left to feel: it is the book of a process. Hope Abandoned is about what despair is like when even the memory of an alternative has been dispelled: the book of a result. The second book’s subject is spiritual desolation as a way of life. Several times, in the course of the text, Nadezhda proclaims her fear that the very idea of normality has gone from the world.

— Clive James, Cultural Amnesia (2007), p.416

***

We refer both to Xi Jinping’s China and to Trump’s America as ‘empires of tedium’. That is to say, regardless of their formidable strengths, be they overlapping or contrasting, the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America are in a circuit of history from which they both may, eventually, grow out of or escape from. To achieve that velocity of positive change, however, requires the painstaking and tiresome work of facing the tedious realities of the past and the crippling realities of the present. For those mindful of American and Chinese socio-political change over the past sixty years, the recidivism of the 2020s is without question tedious, troubling and tenebrous. In both cases, the inevitable biological attrition that faces their respective ‘Great Men’ may promise a brighter future. Or not.

Given the haunting parallels between Trump’s USA and Xi Jinping’s Chinese Republic, we have repeatedly suggested that it is time for a new academic and journalistic analytical approach to the Sino-American conundrum. We’ll call it ‘Whataboutism Studies’, a somewhat different form of Both-Sidesism, and it explores how the Horseshoe Theory might offer a useful perspective on the bilateral Apache dance. The theory suggests that the right — in this case ‘American Fascism’ — and left — China’s state socialism bend toward each other like the ends of a horseshoe. Even though false equivalencies abound in US-China discussions, real equivalents deserve attention, in particular in the post-COVID era when political and economic pilgrims seek influence as New China Experts.

For more on the Empires of Tedium, see:

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
10 December 2025

***