President Donald Trump’s historic comeback within the 2024 election has left many political pundits dumbfounded, however one author believes Trump’s help amongst one sizable however little-discussed group carried him over the end line.
And he or she was a type of voters.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, a columnist for The Free Press and writer of “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women,” had a viral alternate with Invoice Maher, who challenged her on her help for Trump on final Friday’s installment of his HBO program “Real Time.”
He mistakenly referred to her as a “conservative Republican.”
“I was never a Republican or a conservative,” Ungar-Sargon advised Maher. “I used to be a leftist, and I’m nonetheless a leftist. I’m only a MAGA leftist now because-“
“That makes no sense,” a perplexed Maher reacted.
Whereas her label didn’t ring true to Maher, it did to many others.
“Since I was on Bill Maher, I have gotten thousands, and I mean thousands, of messages from people saying, ‘I am just like you. Thank you so much. That’s who I am. That’s what I am.’ And these are the people who gave President Trump his victory,” Ungar-Sargon advised Fox Information Digital. “Because he wouldn’t have won if he only got people who had voted Republican in 2020, in 2016. He won because he convinced millions of people in swing states and across the country that he had their best interests at heart, many of them who had been Democrats. And I guess that’s who I speak for.”
Ungar-Sargon defines “MAGA leftist” as somebody who identifies with “the labor left” in believing that the working class “is the backbone of any society, and their ability to achieve a middle-class standard of living is the defining feature of whether we will have a stable democracy or not.”
“To me, that’s sort of what ‘left’ means, along with all the other stuff being anti-war, being pro-free speech, you know, this was all, like, left stuff, and now it’s MAGA stuff,” Ungar-Sargon stated.
The unbiased journalist, who additionally wrote “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy,” pushed again on the notion that she underwent a “political evolution” since she says her views haven’t modified a lot.
She did, nonetheless, concede that she was as soon as a “woke leftist” with extreme “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
“In 2015, I hated him. In 2016, when he won, I stopped going to my favorite bar, Wheeler’s, the local cop bar in Sheepshead Bay [in Brooklyn, New York], because everybody there had voted for him, and I felt that it was a personal betrayal,” Ungar-Sargon admitted, laughing at herself. “Like I was one of those lefties. I really had the derangement bad, ok? I’m embarrassed to say. Of course, now I’m back at Wheeler’s more often than I should be, probably.”
What triggered her tectonic shift away from TDS didn’t precisely contain Trump himself (although her pro-Trump Orthodox rabbi actually helped).
It was a 2018 Yale College examine that confirmed White liberals have been extra more likely to dumb down their language when talking to individuals of coloration in comparison with White conservatives.
“I remember when I read that I was so shook because I instantly recognized that it was true,” Ungar-Sargon recalled. “And it was an indictment of not just my milieu, but my entire worldview, which I immediately could recognize was built on the same thing that makes White liberals behave in such a racist way, which was this idea that Blacks and Hispanics are beneath us and need our help. Like, it’s disgusting. But the entire progressive movement is really based on that idea.”
“So I remember looking at that study and feeling like I’m about to lose all my friends because this is true, and it’s undeniable, and it’s an indictment of everything I think,” she continued. “And so I keep in mind I put it in a desk drawer in my workplace. I closed the door and I stated, ‘I’m not able to take care of the fallout right here. I’m not able to acknowledge this. I’ll be again in three months.’ And three months later, I got here again, and I used to be like, ‘Okay, what does this mean, Batya? Like, what does it mean you’re flawed about?’
“And that sort of slowly started to change my perception of President Trump because this was such orthodoxy. Everything I thought was like, you know, the fundamentals of what I believed were so clearly wrong. And again, you have this feeling of like, ‘Well, if I’m wrong about this, what else might I be wrong about?’”
She described the 2020 election as being a “toss up” along with her vote finally being for Joe Biden.
What the nation underwent through the COVID pandemic, between how everybody was “lied to” concerning the virus and the hurt lockdowns and vaccine mandates had on the working class, all finished by the elites, was a deterrent for her to proceed supporting the Democratic Occasion that she says has rejected her. In the meantime, Trump was reshaping the Republican Occasion.
And in doing so, she stated, he constructed a coalition that included pro-life, pro-traditional marriage conservatives and pro-choice, pro-gay marriage leftists like herself.
“That is his genius, right? He looked at the party. He looked at the Reagan party, which was socially conservative, free trade and foreign interventions and foreign wars. And he had the confidence to say, ‘That is not where the American people are at. They’re not socially conservative, they’re socially moderate. They support gay marriage, and they want there to be exceptions for abortion,’” Ungar-Sargon stated.
“Can you imagine the confidence to not only take on the Democrats, but to destroy and rebuild the GOP? People say [it’s rebuilt] in his image, but it’s not in his image. It’s in the image of the American working class. On every issue. You look at the polling and President Trump is where 65 to 90% of Americans are at. And he just had the confidence to say, like, ‘This is where the electorate is at. I love the American people, and I’m going to represent them.’ And that is exactly what he did,” she added.
Ungar-Sargon discovered this first-hand whereas interviewing working-class People for her e book “Second Class,” with lots of them praising Trump’s insurance policies from his first time period in workplace.
“People would make a very persuasive case to me about how his protectionist economic policies, specifically around trade and the border, had put money in their pockets and helped them become people who could aspire to the American dream once again after they had thought that that was really off the table for them,” the writer stated. “And I started to see the president as somebody who was a polarizing character only for the elites. But when you got out of the elites, he was actually a very unifying person who had a very unifying agenda when it came to kind of normies.”
“And I really came to respect what he had done in terms of seeing through the interests of the elites that had been pushed for 50 years by both parties and saying, ‘Actually, I’m going to take on the elites on both sides on behalf of the forgotten men and women of this great country,’” she continued. “And I think that I just could no longer deny that that was the real story, despite what all of us were told all the time about President Trump.”
All through her political journey, Ungar-Sargon felt welcomed by the MAGA motion, saying individuals would attain out and inform her, “I don’t agree with you about everything, but you are so welcome in this movement.”
“And it’s the exact opposite of the left. The left- if you agree with them on 99.9% of the issues, and you have a 0.1% disagreement on some issue, like, ‘Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t defund the police, how about reforming the police?’ You are dead to them. You are out. They will do anything to destroy your life,” she advised Fox Information Digital.
“And there’s clearly an appetite within MAGA not just to be part of a multi-racial coalition, which I think a lot of people in the movement are very proud of, and not just to have people from all walks of life and all religions represented, but even to have people from all ideological walks of life. Itis a very welcoming movement for people who come at the abortion question, let’s say, from a slightly different point of view. I mean, President Trump and JD Vance come at the abortion question from different points of view, and there’s no reason that the GOP shouldn’t be a big tent around this kind of beautiful diversity.”
Within the 2024 election, for the very first time, she voted for Trump, a choice she expressed zero remorse for on “Real Time.”
“I mean, you must have a feeling in your gut- look me in the eye and tell me you don’t- that this is really going badly, and I shouldn’t have thrown my lot in with this team,” Maher stated to Ungar-Sargon, to which she replied, “Oh, no, I feel the opposite.”
She gave Maher credit score for inviting her again on his present in what she known as a “genuine attempt” at understanding why she and others proceed to help Trump. She suspected the ideological disconnect might come right down to pure economics.
“The argument that I made in both of my books was that for the leftist progressive elites, a lot of this is economic. And I’m not saying this about Bill [Maher] specifically, but I think as a class, their economic interests are very much at odds with those of the people that Trump represents,” Ungar-Sargon stated. “They’ve made trillions of dollars collectively out of the open border, and they’ve been able to dress up the economic benefits of their progressivism as virtue while actually it’s wage theft of their working-class neighbors, right? Because they can hire illegals instead of having to hire working-class people, which puts money back in their pockets. A lot of money.”
The columnist went on to say that as a substitute of strengthening the decrease and center lessons, the liberal elite would moderately “raise the bar on what counts as poor and pay people off not to work.”
“It’s kind of like a plane, you know, and the knowledge industry, leftist elites, the over-credentialed, you know, multi-credentialed top 10% who now control 60% of the GDP, they’re in first class,” Ungar-Sargon stated. “And what they’re basically saying to the American people is ‘We’re happy to pay your ticket, and you can fly on this plane for free as long as you stay in coach,’ you know. ‘Don’t you dare use our bathrooms. And there’s no upgrades. And you don’t get to say where the plane is going. But as long as you’re happy to sit in economy, you can sit there for free, and we’ll pay your ticket.’ That’s really, like, the best metaphor for the Democratic Party right now.”
In distinction, she stated Trump understands his supporters don’t desire a free trip and wish an economic system that delivers a “modest version of the American dream.”
