President Donald Trump’s historic comeback in the 2024 election has left many political pundits dumbfounded, but one writer believes Trump’s support among one sizable but little-discussed group carried him over the finish line. And she was one of those voters.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, a columnist for The Free Press and author of “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women,” had a viral exchange with Bill Maher, who challenged her on her support for Trump on last 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 told Maher. “I was a leftist, and I’m still a leftist. I’m just a MAGA leftist now because-“
“That makes no sense,” a perplexed Maher reacted.
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Author and columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon perplexed HBO host Bill Maher after she told him she’s a “MAGA leftist.” (Screenshots/HBO)
While her label did not 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 told Fox News 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 someone 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.”
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“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 said.
The independent journalist, who also wrote “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy,” pushed back at the notion that she underwent a “political evolution” since she says her views haven’t changed much. She did, however, concede that she was once a “woke leftist” with severe “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.”
Ungar-Sargon admits she had a severe case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” when President Trump first emerged in politics. (DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
What triggered her tectonic shift away from TDS didn’t exactly involve Trump himself (though her pro-Trump Orthodox rabbi certainly helped). It was a 2018 Yale University study that showed White liberals were more likely to dumb down their language when speaking to people of color compared to 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 remember I put it in a desk drawer in my office. I closed the door and I said, ‘I’m not ready to deal with the fallout here. I’m not ready to acknowledge this. I’ll be back in three months.’ And three months later, I came back, and I was like, ‘Okay, what does this mean, Batya? Like, what does it mean you’re wrong 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?'”
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Ungar-Sargon praised President Trump’s “genius” in appealing to moderates and leftists like herself while maintaining his support among the conservative right. (AP/Rick Bowmer)
She described the 2020 election as being a “toss up” with her vote ultimately being for Joe Biden.
What the country underwent during the COVID pandemic, between how everyone was “lied to” about the virus and the harm lockdowns and vaccine mandates had on the working class, all done by the elites, was a deterrent for her to continue supporting the Democratic Party that she says has rejected her. Meanwhile, Trump was reshaping the Republican Party.
And in doing so, she said, he built 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 said.
“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 learned this first-hand while interviewing working-class Americans for her book “Second Class,” with many of them praising Trump’s policies from his first term in office.
“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 author said. “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.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon told Fox News Digital she voted for President Trump for the very first time in the 2024 presidential election. (Screenshot/HBO)
Throughout her political journey, Ungar-Sargon felt welcomed by the MAGA movement, saying people would reach out and tell 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 told Fox News Digital.
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“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. It is 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.”
In the 2024 election, for the very first time, she voted for Trump, a decision she expressed zero regret 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 said to Ungar-Sargon, to which she replied, “Oh, no, I feel the opposite.”
She gave Maher credit for inviting her back on his show in what she called a “genuine attempt” at understanding why she and others continue to support Trump. She suspected the ideological disconnect may come down to pure economics.
Batya Ungar-Sargon finally voted for President Trump in 2024 and has no regrets. (Joseph A.Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital; Evan Vucci/AP)
“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 said. “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 instead of strengthening the lower and middle classes, the liberal elite would rather “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 said. “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.”
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In contrast, she said Trump understands his supporters don’t want a free ride and want an economy that delivers a “modest version of the American dream.”
