“With a MAGA-friendly majority on the Supreme Court, scores of allies on the lower federal courts as well in Congress, state legislatures, and governors’ mansions, and a sizable, cultishly loyal, and heavily armed base of political supporters, Trump will have considerable leeway and plenty of backers”, says an article in Foreign Affairs published on June 10, signed by Jon D. Michaels.

The author fears that Trumpism is building its own Deep State, which could be consolidated with Trump’s return to government. Traditional analysts of Western intellectuals tend to characterize countries that do not belong to North America and Western Europe as extremely bureaucratic, corrupt and undemocratic regimes, where internal conspiracies reign as a form of struggle for power. In fact, this characterization perfectly fits the United States of recent decades. The U.S. has one of the largest and certainly the most powerful state bureaucracy in the world. Forget the supposed concerns about LGBT or black people. Those who dominate power in the U.S.A do not care about the rights or lack of rights of these people. They care about more fundamental things, like maintaining strict control of the political regime.

And Trump is a dangerous threat to that control. It tends to concentrate powers in the presidency, with greater power of intervention and control over intelligence agencies and national defense bodies. He learned from the mistakes of his first term and will now only place people he trusts in key positions – and the tendency is for him to change most of the heads of the main areas of government. Another Foreign Affairs article, published by Risa Brooks on March 20, raises concerns about the growing politicization of the American military, fueled by both Trumpist propaganda and Republican lawmakers’ vetoes on the promotion of supposedly liberal officers in the military. So Pentagon chiefs also hate the idea of Trump returning to government. And Pentagon officers are always selected from among the ranks of arms companies, which are worried about the possibility that the United States will withdraw its military bases and troops from Asia and Europe, as their profit comes precisely from the sale of material to the U.S. government and its client countries. The other bodies of the Deep State, such as the CIA and the National Security Council, are also fed with cadres from the military industry, as well as from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, which bring together the large technological and financial monopolies of the United States and the world. Trump has also declared that he could open the secret files on the assassination of John Kennedy, which would reveal a little more about the rot in the CIA and the Deep State, likely responsible for that murder.

Trump could make an unprecedented reconfiguration of the Deep State, the real U.S. government. He is messing with the worst instincts of American imperialism.

The core of the conflict between Trump and the apparatus that runs the U.S. are class contradictions. In this case, the contradictions of the marginalized sectors of the bourgeoisie, the middle class and the proletariat, with the imperialist high bourgeoisie.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a prominent American high society scholar who works daily with America’s biggest capitalists, has emphasized this contradiction in press articles. In the New York Times, he highlighted that, so far, none of the top 100 billionaires on the Fortune list have donated a single penny to Trump’s presidential campaign – just as no CEO donated in 2016 and only two of the top 100 did so in 2020. Furthermore, many businesspeople who financed Trump in 2016 abandoned ship during his administration.

A few financiers have supported the Republican leader, but “in reality, these financiers represent a small segment of the business community,” Sonnenfeld noted in Time.

It is clear from this information and the campaign in the main media that the American upper bourgeoisie does not support Trump. But who supports him?

Just take a look at Trump’s political positions. He is protectionist, isolationist and anti-immigrant. He attacks globalization and promises to take care of the internal situation of the United States and reduce intervention in the affairs of other countries, which would mean a serious blow to the global imperialist regime, even more so at a time of insurrections against this regime around the world.

Obstructing the entry of immigrants would increase the wage rate of American workers, as immigrants who enter the U.S. accept to receive very low wages, reducing the average salary of American workers. That’s why big business people attack Trump’s immigration agenda, in order to maintain low wages with competition from immigrants. Many workers support Trump because they naturally want better wages.

There is even a left wing within Trumpism, as there was in Italian fascism and German Nazism. This is precisely due to the influence of disorganized workers with little political awareness who have suffered intensely from decades of neoliberalism, deindustrialization and traditional Democratic and Republican governments. In both articles for the NYT and Time, Sonnenfeld opines that Trump’s economic policies are much more similar to those of the socialist left than to the traditional positions of the Republican Party, “and are often far more progressive than the Biden Administration.”

Corporations are very unpopular among the entire American population and even among members of both parties, which is why even Biden has to criticize them and adopt measures that they dislike. Even powerful sectors within the U.S.A were affected by the dominance of monopolies over the economy, as they suppressed competition from businesspeople who remained on the margins of power. In fact, if such a small minority governs, even rich sectors of society end up harmed. And they didn’t like having their lives and businesses spied on by the NSA or losing their customers and almost going bankrupt due to competition from foreign, mainly Chinese, producers.

In recent years, the U.S. has become dependent on China in several areas, such as electronics, video games, machinery, textiles, chemicals, metals, etc. That is, mainly in relation to manufactured products. The companies of Elon Musk, a notorious Trump supporter, are competitors to Chinese internet and electric car companies. This entire vast business sector, which encompasses multitudes of companies and businesspeople, agrees when Trump says that the U.S. needs to protect itself from competition from China and other countries. So much so that they exerted great pressure on the Biden administration to be the most anti-China in history by imposing high tariffs and sanctions, controlling and banning investments and being on the verge of banning Tik Tok. In the geopolitical sphere, the Biden administration is perhaps the most aggressive against China, threatened with war against the U.S. over Taiwan. Many understand that the U.S.’s main geopolitical enemy is not terrorism, Iran or Russia, but rather China. Its penetration of the U.S. domestic market generates accusations of both industrial, technological and political espionage and the economic strengthening of a power challenging American hegemony.

Eduardo Vasco is a Brazilian journalist specializing in international politics.