Who is Batya Ungar-Sargon?: A Berkeley-educated leftist who couldn’t bear drinking at a bar with Trump voters is now MAGA’s top defender. A tale for our times. (Nate Weisberg, April 9, 2025, Washington Monthly)
Maher opens by asking Ungar-Sargon whether, two months into the administration, she regrets throwing her lot in with Trump.
“Oh, no, I feel the opposite,” she responds. “When I look at what President Trump ran on and the agenda that he’s enacting right now, he took a Republican Party that was built on social conservatism, foreign interventions and wars, and free trade and free markets, and he basically took an ax to all of those.” Her defense builds momentum as she elaborates on Trump’s departures from traditional conservatism. “He’s pretty pro-gay. It’s pretty obvious. He appointed the highest-ranking out gay person, Scott Bessent, our secretary of treasury, which is incredible, and he sidelined the pro-life wing of his party.”
She then adroitly pivots to what she really wants to talk about—economic populism. “Trump looked at our destroyed manufacturing base. He looked at the downwardly mobile working class. He looked at the fact that working-class Americans can no longer afford the American dream.” Her cadence picks up. “There was a handshake agreement between both parties that we should somehow have free trade, which resulted in shipping 5 million good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico. What they did was they brought in millions and millions of illegal migrants to compete with the jobs that remained here … What Donald Trump said was we have to stop selling out the working class. That agenda that he laid out is socially moderate, antiwar, and anti–free trade, protectionist. That,” she concludes, “is a leftist position!”