Trump’s Politics and a Declining US Capitalism in 2026
Image by Artur Ament.
A year into Trump’s second term clarifies what his presidency aims to accomplish. On the one hand, his initiatives and their impacts are widely overemphasized. Far less well recognized are how received conditions and conventional Party politics in the US produced Trump and most of what he does. Underlying both Trump, US politics, and their whole environment are the basic changes in US capitalism that both shape and reflect its declining place in the world. These include especially certain class, race and gender aspects of those changes.
Trump’s Republican Party (GOP) never stopped being a coalition. On the one hand, the Party’s major donors have mostly been leading members of the class of private US employers. Those donors provide the key funds that higher Party officials use to organize and mobilize the other side of the coalition, particularly blocs of voters. Major donors divide into three groups: those who give to the GOP, those who give to the DEMs, and those who patronize both. Both parties use the money from their major donors to organize their mass of voters, win offices, and thereby reward those donors. The GOP and DEMs compete for voters using their respective donors’ money. The donor class’s donations protect it from serious or sustained criticism by either major US Party. They are costs of that class’s hegemony. Neither coalition dares to offer such criticism, for fear of threatening its capacity for donations and, by extension, the party’s very survival.
From time to time, one Party performs better than the other in working this “Coalition-Politics”. It gets more money from donors and/or undercuts donations to the other party. It is more successful than the other party in securing or building blocs of voters. The other party then fights back. In the decades before Trump, the Republican Party coalition declined. While the GOP delivered dutifully to its major donors, it merely fed symbols more than changed realities to its voting masses. The GOP loudly opposed abortions but never actually stopped them. It supported fundamentalist Christianity but more in words than deeds. It endorsed neoliberal globalization and celebrated the profits it brought to its donors, but it barely acknowledged, and far less compensated, the losses it imposed on the US working class.
Over recent decades, the DEMs coalition also endorsed neo-liberal globalization and likewise celebrated its profitability as if it were “good for all America.” Some DEM leaders gave lip-service recognition to workers’ losses from globalization. They likewise claimed “concern” that globalization aggravated US inequalities of wealth and income and “hollowed out of the middle class.” However DEMs offered little more than rhetoric, since big donations from globalization’s leading beneficiaries remained a key DEM party goal. US workers hurt by globalization thus felt increasingly alienated, disappointed and betrayed by the DEM coalition. Meanwhile, that coalition redirected its focus and appeal toward women and racial/ethnic minorities as voting blocs. Opposing the discrimination those blocs had long suffered in the US entailed far less risk of losing major corporate and individual donors. Only a relatively few voices on the progressive left of the DEM coalition criticized the costly impacts of globalization on the working class. DEM leadership undertook only modest “progressive” steps (although often claiming to do more than those steps actually achieved). For not really doing more, of course, DEMs blamed the GOP.
So long as this sort of politics worked for the DEMs, the GOP adopted a “me too” approach suggesting sympathy for the interests and women and minorities. But once decades of globalization had immiserated sufficiently large (and especially male, white) sections of the US working class, Republicans changed their approach. They increasingly turned the DEMs’ appeals to women and non-whites against the DEMs by portraying those appeals as indicating that DEMs had abandoned the white, male, Christian working class. Enter Donald Trump who rode this turn the furthest by sharply ejecting the traditional GOP leadership (Bush family etc.) that had hesitated to go that far.
The Trump-led GOP coalition seeks the same donors from the same class (employers) as always. That coalition likewise seeks the votes of largely white blocs of workers (especially male, fundamentalist Christian, super-patriotic, etc.). However, unlike traditional Republicans, Trumpers go much further in pandering to the more extreme among those voters, those dissatisfied with mere symbolism. They promise to go far beyond the limits of the traditional GOP leadership to reverse all they blame on the DEMs (and especially on Obama and Biden).
Trump’s GOP loudly proclaims that DEMs care only about females, black and brown workers, and immigrants. Trump’s GOP charges that DEMs get votes by getting jobs and incomes for these females, black, brown and immigrant workers (illegal as well as legal). Moreover, Trump repeats, those jobs and income came at the expense of the jobs and incomes for male, white, Christian workers and their communities. Republicans successfully blamed DEMs for the suffering of white, male Christian workers who lost their jobs to globalization since the 1980s. DEMS minimally criticized the US employer class (to secure its donors) and focused instead on attacking China (as if the decision to move jobs from the US to Asia was China’s rather than a decision made by the heads of US corporations).
Trump’s serious campaigns for president arrived after several decades of GOP and Democratic coalitions alternating in power. Across those decades, US capitalism had benefited from ongoing US government support. Huge tax cuts and government spending programs boosted corporate profits. Huge government bailouts followed stock and credit market crashes. Both parties endorsed, advanced, and protected neo-liberal globalization as they competed for major donors. In contrast, both doled out merely symbolic gestures to their respective voters. For not doing more, each Party attacked the other in a blame game that proved decreasingly effective. Slowly but steadily increasing portions of the voting blocs inside both Parties’ coalitions became alienated from voting and party politics altogether.
Trump’s personality and personal beliefs fit the historical moment and therefore served it. Forces had accumulated that understood (or at least vaguely sensed) the need for US capitalism to get more support than that provided by both Parties’ traditional coalitions. The decline of US capitalism relative to China, on the one hand, generated those forces. On the other hand, so did decades of decline in the numbers, well-being, and political identifications of unionized US manufacturing workers Those forces found Trump, an outsider to both coalitions, willing to go much further than traditional Party leaderships to rebuild the numbers and commitment of their respective coalition voters.
The Republican wing of those forces found immense potential in Trump’s extreme hostility toward immigrants, apparent sympathy for white supremacy, support for fundamentalist Christianity, and disdain for traditional leaders of both major parties. That wing was thrilled by his promises to ban abortions, celebrate fundamentalist Christianity and the NRA, increase tolerance for white supremacy, and reject “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) and ecological initiatives as hoaxes or worse. These were just the ticket to reanimate the GOP’s voting bloc base. Trump reiterated promises to the Party’s major donors that he would deliver historic tax cuts, subsidies, and massive deregulation of their business practices. With their donations, of course, Trump’s extremism could secure the votes needed to have the US government deliver on promises made to both parts of the Republican coalition.
In the views of those who early found and supported him, Trump had what it would take to rescue the Republican Party from a coalition gone stale. via neglect of its voter blocs’ sufferings from neo-liberal globalization. That rescue took the form of ending the GOPs neglect of globalization’s victims while seeking to re-engage the more extreme right wing chiefly by talking much more bluntly than traditional politicians of either Party had dared. He mocked them for their timidity. He defeated them in Republican primaries. He excoriated his DEM opponents for their favoring immigrants, women and non-whites. He mostly blamed them – not big business – for the losses suffered by white, male Christian workers. His aggressive language toward all conventional politicians who opposed him aimed to prove to the masses that he would deliver what earlier Republicans had failed to do. Meanwhile, he kept reassuring the billionaires that they would receive enhanced riches for their donations.
Bernie Sanders – a “progressive” Independent who caucuses with the Democrats and describes himself as “socialist” – offered the DEM coalition a different kind of rejuvenation. He too promised much more to the DEM masses of voters than traditional DEM leaders had dared to do. What sharply differentiated Sanders were his clearly explicit criticisms of the US employer class. In his view, that class did not need or deserve lavish gifts (huge tax cuts and subsidies) from elected politicians. It was instead to be blamed and held accountable for the costs that its profit-raising decisions imposed on the working class. Sanders’ presidential campaigns showed both that mass support of its voting blocs could be rebuilt and that such support could deliver many millions in small donations
Unlike the traditional GOP leaders who failed to stop Trump and got displaced by his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, the traditional DEM leaders grasped how to save themselves from a comparable displacement. They committed to destroying Sanders’ presidential campaigns. Despite that, other progressive Democrats and socialists followed Sanders. Victories like those of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in Congress and Zohran Mamdani in New York City have further developed what Sanders started. So too did the mass mobilization in Minneapolis in late January 2026 against Trump’s ICE army with its creative and effective use of the general strike.
Polling as well as other evidence suggests that Sanders’ “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party is gaining popularity both within the Party and generally. They may well become the left-wing equivalent of the MAGA masses supporting Trump. If confrontations escalate, the US employer class may then throw its full weight on the MAGA side and fulfill the fascistic inclinations already in play on that side. As great American artists have insisted before, “it can happen here.” Trump’s strategy will then be internal repression to end the socially disruptive confrontations threatening the MAGA project, the system’s profits and possibly rising to challenge the capitalist system itself.
Trump’s internal program is still largely intact early in 2026. However, the continuing decline of the US empire and of its relative position in the world economy takes its toll. So too does mounting social opposition to Trump’s “handling” of the Epstein scandal, opposition of many inside as well as outside MAGA against the Israel-US alliance over Gaza, and widespread revulsion against ICE’s violence and its mission. Always a candidate for action to distract from mounting domestic problems, foreign affairs attracted the Trump team (despite his failure to end the war in Ukraine quickly as he had promised). However, bombing Iran (jointly with Israel), abducting Venezuelan president Maduro, threatening Greenland, Denmark and NATO over his intended “taking” of Greenland, bombing a Nigerian village, threatening to reclaim Panama, threatening war with Iran, menacing Canada and Mexico (and, of course, Cuba yet again) have proven to be unpopular in the US. So successive polls show.
Most intractable are the economic problems that beset Trump’s regime. Even if the Supreme Court validates Trump’s global imposition of tariffs, their effects are having troubling results for Trump. Far from enough new revenue will be generated to do much to reduce US budget deficits. Indeed, Trump’s proposed War Department budget increase of $600 billion will worsen US deficits significantly. That budget increase alone is several times larger than estimates of what Trump’s tariffs will yield. Likewise, savings from Musk’s DOGE storm fell far short of generating the hyped and hoped budget cuts. Nations opposing the US takeover of Greenland led to a free trade deal between the European Union and Mercosur and renewed trade negotiations between China, on the one hand, and Germany, France, and the UK. Trump’s maneuvers to control exports of Nvidia’s semi-conductor chips once again led to China’s retaliation around rare earths. Finally, US tariffs and threats against Canada have now produced new trade deals between Canada and China. The economic impacts of these and similar deals already under consideration threaten significant long-term economic damages and costs.
Soon, the rise of China and its BRICS allies combined with the decline of the US and what may be left of the G7 alliance will shift in a basic way. One historical epoch is fading while another is replacing it. We are at inflection points where quantitative becomes qualitative and where change shifts from slow to fast. The goal of current political moves toward various forms of authoritarianism in many capitalisms is to hold all this back. But for many of those authoritarianisms, it is too late. They have inherited too many overlapping problems from capitalism’s decline. They have too little in the way of real options to solve them.
Socialisms of various kinds, variously infused with the histories and characteristics of different nations, are preparing to replace today’s authoritarian efforts to hold back historic change. Those Socialisms self-preparations entail a return to full commitments to democracy in politics but also in economics. The latter includes the democratization of internal organizational structures within enterprises (factories, offices, and stores). Socialisms are becoming the champions of democracy just as capitalism’s self-preservation forces it toward authoritarianism. Socialisms respond to their own histories by moving more towards democracy while capitalisms respond to their histories by shifting more towards authoritarian social structures. Such ironies of modern history reflect a profound period of change, full of abundant dangers but also of historic opportunities for a new and better world.
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