Trump is forging a big-tent coalition. And the Left doesn’t know how to counter it.
Now a high-profile Democrat betrayed her party to team up with Donald Trump.
Trump’s Unexpected Allies
Donald Trump’s stunning 2024 election triumph has left the chattering class scratching their heads, but one writer insists a hidden powerhouse bloc—often overlooked—propelled him to victory. Batya Ungar-Sargon, a columnist for The Free Press and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, counts herself among them.
Her viral sparring match with Bill Maher on last Friday’s Real Time on HBO lit up the internet when Maher, baffled, pegged her as a “conservative Republican.” “I was never a Republican or a conservative,” she shot back. “I was a leftist, and I’m still a leftist. I’m just a MAGA leftist now because—” Maher, cutting in, blurted, “That makes no sense.”
To Maher, the label was gibberish; to countless others, it rang true. “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.”
The Rise of the MAGA Leftist
Ungar-Sargon’s “MAGA leftist” tag isn’t just a catchy soundbite. She roots it in “the labor left,” where 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.”
For her, that’s the heart of “left”—tied to anti-war stances, free speech zeal, and a vibe that’s “all, like, left stuff, and now it’s MAGA stuff.”
The indie journalist, also behind Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, bristles at talk of a “political evolution.”
Her core views, she insists, haven’t budged much. But she cops to a past as a “woke leftist” with a bad case of “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,” she confessed, chuckling.
“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.”
Her wake-up call wasn’t Trump himself (though a pro-Trump Orthodox rabbi nudged her along).
It was a 2018 Yale study showing White liberals dumbed down their speech for people of color more than White conservatives did. “I remember when I read that I was so shook because I instantly recognized that it was true,” she 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.”
She stashed the study in a drawer, muttering, “I’m not ready to deal with the fallout here,” only to revisit it three months later, asking herself, “What does it mean you’re wrong about?”
From TDS to Trump’s Big Tent
The 2020 election was a coin toss—she voted Biden. But the COVID era, with its “lies” about the virus, brutal lockdowns, and vaccine mandates hammering the working class, soured her on the Democrats. Meanwhile, Trump was remolding the GOP.
“That is his genius, right? 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,’” she 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.”
Interviewing working-class folks for Second Class, she heard glowing takes on Trump’s first-term moves.
“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,” she said. Trump, she realized, was a unifier for “normies,” not the elite’s boogeyman.
MAGA welcomed her with open arms. “I don’t agree with you about everything, but you are so welcome in this movement,” fans told her—unlike the left, where a sliver of dissent means exile.
In 2024, she voted Trump, a choice she stood by 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 pressed. “Oh, no, I feel the opposite,” she fired back, unflinching.
