A recent conversation with a close friend, a former Democratic voter turned MAGA backer, is revealing. It came on the heels of events involving President Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted child sex offender, U.S. financier and enabler to political elites in and out of America. Clearly, the president’s reversal of position on the Justice Department releasing the Epstein files, from no to yes, is a factor for my friend’s change of heart regarding MAGA.

My friend’s change arrived on revelations of sexual crimes, not the multiple other criminal violations of domestic and global laws during the president’s second term. Pedophilia is however a different kettle of fish, though timing of a release of the Epstein files is unclear.

Adults having sex with minor children is taboo, a bridge too far. The political fallout within MAGA is underway. Witness the MAGA fracture between GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) calling for the full release of the Epstein files while Trump fought against that.

Is she sincere or reading the political winds? Readers get two guesses. The first doesn’t count.

Earlier in Trump’s second term, I elaborated to my friend on what had made America great, economically. American corporate-government power and wealth increased after WW ll until the 1970s, due to the absence of competition from corporations based in the defeated foes, Japan and Germany.

No hegemony rules forever. Eventually, German and Japanese corporations rebuilt. As a result, U.S. corporations lost their monopoly profits in production and distribution.

Stateside, the ending of the postwar political economy has devastated working families. The DP-GOP duopoly on behalf of corporate America has been the driving force of this class warfare. The political donor class won this war. Its strategy in part featured the outsourcing of U.S. industry abroad and replacing it with finance.

A big piece of this class war has been the corporate attack on labor unions. Real wages stagnated. Working families got loans instead of raises, according to Professor Richard D. Wolff, an author and economist.

Household debt has skyrocketed. A driving force has been the sharp price hikes for higher education. Student loan debt is an 800-pound gorilla in the room of working families across the U.S., thanks to a bipartisan politics that helps Wall Street and harms everyone else.

Political movements of, by and for the U.S. working majority have been unable to overcome the power of the corporate-Democratic Party to co-opt and crush independent economics and politics over the past 50 years. I have hammered the point home to my friend.

Consider Rev. Jesse Jackson’s cross-racial coalition and his presidential bids in the 1980s. Take Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ run for the White House three decades later. There were factors and forces behind the births and deaths of both political campaigns, the highest and most powerful of which was the profit-based donor dollars funding the DP.

Away from electoral politics, consider the Occupy Wall Street movement’s rise and fall after the Great Recession. Then there’s the arrival of the Movement for Black Lives after the police homicide of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Uncle Sam’s not-so hidden hand is all over the fate of both popular uprisings.

Here’s a takeaway, not an original thought, but one with staying power that bears repeating, perhaps for a younger generation. Political power flows from the class interests that control law enforcement and the military.

The corporate-Democratic Party has, successfully, talked left and walked right. By that I mean rhetorically backing Main Street while accepting donor dollars from the Fortune 500 class. That social-political relationship boosts the bottom lines of monopoly banks and corporations, shifting income and wealth from the bottom and middle to the top. My friend has heard that breakdown from me, repeatedly.

Back to Trump. He feels the pain, broadly speaking, of voters, attracting some who had voted for Democrats. The NAFTA was the worst trade pact ever for America, he said. True for one class of Americans, working families.

By contrast, the capitalist class benefited. Trump is in that class. He no more represents workers than Wall Street puts people’s needs before corporate profits and the next quarterly earnings report. That’s not happening until pigs fly, and my next haircut makes me resemble Brad Pitt.

Past comments to my friend on U.S. domestic and foreign policy moves under the second Trump administration at the end of the American empire resonated much less than releasing the Epstein files. My thesis in our past conversations about the president’s deeds and words in the context of what Ralph Nader calls the two political party duopoly are straightforward.

Follow the donor dollars, I said to my friend. The Democratic Party under Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden with their policies that favored profits over wages created the political-social conditions for a snake oil salesman like Trump to capture voters. That’s a way to make some sense of the MAGA movement.

Trump’s superficial advocacy of his supporters features the politics of division and religious nationalism. Part of it is pitting the foreign-born against native Americans. Anti-blackness is no small part of Trump’s playbook. Splitting the working class along the color line is an old game, politically speaking.

Trump’s support of Israel, continuing that of Biden’s, a live-streamed genocide against the people of Gaza laid the groundwork for the Epstein-related MAGA fracture. Ditto for Trump’s threats to invade Venezuela, with its mammoth oil reserves the prize for Big Oil driving the ecological disaster underway.

Add the Trump trade tariffs, a tax that U.S. businesses not foreign importers pay. This trade policy is worsening the affordability crisis. My friend and I have discussed all that. He keeps a close eye on prices, as I do.

However, it’s the Epstein files leading the way to weaken support for MAGA. Its rise and demise could result in Trumpism without Trump. Such conditions could produce an opening for policies that have broad public support, from Medicare for All to affordable rental housing and a war-free foreign policy. Such policies will have to transcend the political duopoly.

The post Is MAGA Weakening? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.