Trump’s MAGA policies are fuelling huge class polarisation

Matt Dobson

The Trump administration is a great upsetter, stirring up a new era of volatile geopolitical, economic and military clashes globally.

Domestically, his regime is also the accelerator of polarising trends and civil strife now woven deep into the fabric of capitalism’s most powerful nation.

Trump’s militarised intervention into the Los Angeles protests, one of the most significant since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, bypassing judicial checks, represents an administration hurtling towards constitutional chaos.

In parallel, Trump’s economic policy, including his tariffs costing US multinationals like Nike billions, his conflict with the Federal Reserve over interest rates, the widening fiscal deficit and threat of stagflation are all outgrowths of the inability of a protectionist, economic nationalist capitalist policy to lift the living standards of working-class Americans that have stagnated for half a century.

What will be the impact of his “One Big Beautiful Bill”? Aside from opening chasms in the Republican party, and even in his own administration with the sidelining of Elon Musk, it allows a bonanza of tax cuts for the wealthy, obliterates Medicaid for millions and other federal welfare programmes which 40% of the population of the states where Trump had the highest vote depend daily on.

Trump throws extra funding at the military against the backdrop of increased involvement in wars abroad, causing ruptures in the Make America Again (MAGA) movement who bought his promises of isolationism after the traumas of Iraq and Afghanistan in past decades.

Industrial workers who were seduced by MAGA’s promises to increase wages and jobs have seen their trade union rights under attack. Even farmers, 78% who supported Trump, are enraged by the impact of tariffs, immigration policies that cause labour shortages and cuts to their USDA Federal support programmes.

In the New York Times, an Illinois farmer John Bartman exposes the hollowness of MAGA in power “if Uncle Sam reneges on a farmer they’ll renege on anybody”.

LA protests

The explosion in Los Angeles, with protests spreading to the east coast are a glimpse of the social and class conflicts that are coming. A beefing up of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under far-right racist Miller opens a pandoras box for Trump.

There was widespread revulsion that working class people’s “hard working family members neighbours” were being targeted for deportation.

It ignited the rage of the youth from all backgrounds, again echoing not just the uprisings in LA in the 60s such as Wattsville, but the mass school student walkouts for public funding and against deportations in the 1990s that shook that city and won victories.

ICE’s brutal raids on migrant workers desperately queuing outside Home Depots for the chance of a low paid gig epitomises the stark brutality of 21st century US capitalism.

As did the city’s mass homeless population who also participated in the street conflict. Significantly, it was the arrest of a trade union leader that transformed the confrontation with ICE and the LAPD.

The Labor unions have the critical role to play in the struggle against racism, deportation and uniting the US working class in struggle.

In Tacoma Labor activists have organised and physically defended their workmates from ICE.
The militant youth and Latino activists, like previous generations before them who were involved in the Brown Beret Chicano movement in the early 1970s and labor struggles, will begin to learn.

The key lessons are that mass struggle with working class methods, including mass strikes, blockades and pickets, are the most effective forms of struggle against the bosses and the state machine rather than disorganised violence.

The ongoing class battles across the border in Mexico, with workers fighting to unionise General Motors plants, will also have an impact.

It wont be lost on activists that while the Democrat governor and city mayor denounced Trumps militarised approach, and this will have built illusions for some, that it was the LAPD that is under their control that imposed the mass arrests and curfews.

They also facilitated ICE’s actions that dampened the protest movement and kept it in the downtown area before it mobilised the vast populations of workers and poor in the rest of the city.

The mass No Kings protests that followed in every major city across the country, including hundreds of thousands in cities like Philadelphia, show the scale of the building radicalisation under Trump.

This polarisation in US society is being reflected politically and not just in the mass turnouts at the “Fight Oligarchy” rallies of Bernie Sanders and Democrat congresswoman Oscario Cortez, including in Trump majority states.

Mamdani

Dramatically a self-described “socialist”, Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), won the Democrat primary for New York mayor against the candidate of the corporate Democrat establishment, former state governor Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdani was open about his opposition and activism against Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. He also raised left radical policies on the cost-of-living crisis, including free city buses, rent controls and raising the minimum wage to $30 over the next five years. This has invoked the wrath of Wall Street.

It remains to be seen whether Mamdani can defeat Cuomo, who is tainted by a record of sexual harassment, and his corporate backers who are now running an independent campaign in the autumn.

If Mamdani were to win it would open up conflicts and widen the existing tensions with the Trump administration and states and major cities, as well as the Corporate Democrat machine.

However the Schumer Democrat establishment have succeeded in straitjacketing the radicalism of Sanders and AOC and other DSA supported politicians previously. Mamdani will come under pressure to moderate his programme.

Two Presidents of two of the largest unions AFSCME (municipal employees) and AFT (teachers) resigned from the Democrat National Committee citing the fact the party isn’t reflecting working class anger even in the midst of Mamdani’s victory.

The Democrats in Congress haven’t just not resisted Trump’s onslaught, but in a number of cases assisted it.

That’s why our co-thinkers, the Independent Socialist Group, call for a complete break from the capitalist Democrat party and the establishment of a new workers’ party in the US. Socialists running independently in elections can aid the building of this.

Ultimately all capitalist policies, whether MAGA or not, will fail to arrest the US’s decline and the increasing misery of the US working and middle classes.

Only a socialist transformation taking over the vast resources of US capitalism can achieve this.