Ever since Trump announced that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing votes and then appeared to prove this by ducking through release of the Access Hollywood tape unscathed, it has been a mystery what it would take for Trump’s supporters to turn on him. Scandal after scandal that would have terminated any other politician’s ambition have dropped away from Trump like a Subway®️ sandwich tossed at a bullet-proof vest.

But now we have a near-unanimous vote in favor of a bill that Trump has been fighting for months like a rabid raccoon. To be fair, the vote did get an assist from the wily Donald, who performed a 180° turnabout under threat of mass mutiny from Republicans in Congress. But with Speaker Johnson holding the House in recess for 1/6 of the year to avoid swearing in the 118th signature demanding a vote on release of the Epstein Files, and with the Attorney General and the FBI Director calling in a single key member of the House to be worked over in the White House Situation Room to change her vote, it is obvious that Trump was doing everything he could to avoid the vote.

So, what is different? Why the complete turn-around?

Understand that Trump’s supporters chose him to tear down a system that they have felt has betrayed them—which it has. So far, the scandals are only horrific to those who buy into The System, so (in their thinking) his brazen rejection of norms is a thing to be celebrated like your favorite pro wrestling villain (a sport, by the way, in which Trump has publicly inserted himself).

While globalism has operated like a sort of Baumol Effect on steroids to accelerate value generation for western economies collectively, the benefits have not been distributed throughout the American economy. Two inherent features of lopsided sub-sector productivity growth are that 1) prices of low productivity-growth sector products and services must rise and 2) the cross-elasticity of inputs (labor in particular) puts downward pressure on inputs broadly across all sectors of the economy. Thus it is that prices for housing and services (such as health and child care and fresh produce) have steadily increased relative to the total value of the economy, while real wage growth has been near zero over the last four decades.

As for Donald Trump, the social elite of New York despise the vulgar, blustering, upstart developer from Queens. In their eyes, he is gauche, incompetent, and needy. The quality of his work is known to be poor: a lot of glitz on the surface but cheap, low-quality construction beneath the surface. He is seen as a stupid, fast-talking (lying) blowhard unfit to operate in the circles to which he aspires who would have become (prior to his second term graft spree) far wealthier if he had simply invested the money he inherited from his father in an index fund. Unable to comprehend the sophisticated airs of the New York elite, he burns with resentment at their disdain.

He has communicated a sense of shared grievance with the working-class MAGA who resent The Establishment that has rigged the system to bar them from achieving the American Dream. And Trump has managed to equate The Establishment that rejects him and shackles the left-behind with the Democratic Party. And the MAGA base admire and take permission from Trump’s unashamed embrace of his own salaciously animalistic nature—we are all human animals merely pretending to live free of the appetites that ensure procreation of the dpecies. As a self-proclaimed lecher, Trump has been inoculated from all the lewd scandals (until now).

MAGA has cheered Trump’s criticism of the elite Democrats as hypocritical in their disdain for him and his base by selling a story of the elite’s own, suppressed, salacious nature by encouraging conspiracy theories of “Pizza-Gate,” a Byzantine network of criminals whose evil operations function to satisfy the secret, pedophiliac sexual desires of the rich and powerful (to be understood as Democrats, who supposedly despise regular folks). MAGA has relished the effort to bring down those smug aristocrats (read Democrats) by Trump’s election promise to reveal all their shameful secrets of sexual predation on young girls.

The problem for Trump is that good old, normal sexual drive is well and good, but rape of school-age girls is another matter. This outrage is what has made anger against aristocratic Democrats so vehement. As it becomes clearer and clearer that Donald Trump is increasingly siding with real elites (irrespective of political party) against his common-folk base and is simultaneously becoming more and more clearly entwined with the very real outrage that is Jeffery Epstein, support from his MAGA base is quickly falling away, and Republicans elected to Congress are no longer fearing Trump over the voters.

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, Democrats must rehabilitate the party brand by reaching out directly to all Americans, including the MAGA voters, in a way that definitively dissolves the pre-conceived notion that Democrats are the party that is indifferent to the struggles of regular people. Democrats must propose a new story to entirely reinvent The American Experiment for a new cycle of American history.