In 2016, when Donald Trump was first running for president, Batya Ungar-Sargon was a Hillary Clinton supporter. In 2020, she voted for Joe Biden, “albeit reluctantly.” She is a journalist who lives in New York City and has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. In other words, she checks all the boxes for the stereotypical “coastal elite.”
But Ungar-Sargon is now at the forefront of Democrats cheering on the Trump administration and, as a columnist for The Free Press and the host of a new show on the cable network NewsNation, she’s happy to call herself a “MAGA lefty.”
How did she get from there to here?
Writing for The Free Press, Ungar-Sargon said her transformation began when her rabbi, “the best person I know,” mentioned that he loved Trump, and she had to confront the reality that the negative stereotypes she had held about MAGA were not true. Later, she wrote, “I finally came to the realization that I hadn’t just been wrong about Trump supporters; I’d been wrong about Trump himself.”
The author of “Second Class‚” the 2024 book about the American working class and its struggles, Ungar-Sargon believes that Trump’s vision and policies provide the best chance to lift the fortunes of American families. In addition to her own work, she has become a go-to commentator on shows like “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “The Megyn Kelly Show.”
To the casual viewer, she might seem to have gone full MAGA, irrevocably so.
But Ungar-Sargon, who is 44 and lives in New York, believes that Trump won because many of the policies he embraced used to be promises of the left. She sees him as something of an FDR of the 21st century: “socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers as the backbone of this country.”
And she’s not completely ruling out an eventual return to her political roots, depending on where the post-Trump GOP goes. She’s still a registered Democrat though that’s partly because, as she puts it, “Everyone in New York is a registered Dem so we can vote in primaries.”
In joining NewsNation, where her show airs Saturdays at 2 p.m. MT, Ungar-Sargon says she’s happy to be working for a network that, to her mind, is committed to being politically neutral. “They’re always trying to bring people together, to speak to the average American, who I think is really disgusted at all the polarization,” she said.
In an interview with the Deseret News, Ungar-Sargon talked about how the American landscape has changed in the weeks after Charlie Kirk’s death, the potential problems she sees ahead for the GOP, how the Democrats could claim the MAGA mantle, and why she thinks it’s “cool” to be a conservative again.
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: You’ve been a guest on Fox News, CNN and other networks, in addition to being an editor at Newsweek and other publications. Why launch a TV show, and why on NewsNation?
Batya Ungar-Sargon: I love NewsNation. I think that it has the intimacy of local news even though it’s a national news station. They’re always trying to bring people together and to speak to the average American who I think is really disgusted at all the polarization. The average American has friends who vote differently from them and prays with people who vote differently from them and works with people who vote differently from them, and they cannot understand why people in power are so mean to each other, when they know people who are different from them and it’s no big deal.
In this moment, we really need to find our way back to each other as Americans and remember that more unites us than divides us, and I think this is the outlet that is most committed to that ideal. Our disputes in this moment — our disagreements, our debates — are incredibly important, and they run deep and we have to have them. You can’t pretend that those disagreements aren’t there — they are. But we have to relearn how to have those important debates from a point of view of love and compassion and respect. So that’s what we’re trying to do with the show, and I think that’s what NewsNation is trying to do more broadly.
DN: You sound a little bit like the Utah governor, Spencer Cox.
Ungar-Sargon: I love him! If he’s reading this and wants to come on the show, he has an open invitation.
DN: How do you think America has changed since Sept. 10, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah?
Ungar-Sargon: Well, we know that church attendance is up 15% since Charlie Kirk was murdered. Talk about a legacy. I’ve heard from people who told me they dropped their child off at college, and the child, who had never once before wanted to go to church, said, “Hey, Mom, will you come with me to Mass before you leave?”
We’re hearing stories like that, where people are connecting with their faith in a way they haven’t in a really long time, because of the example Charlie set, and wanting to be part of the solution and wanting to build on what he was out there doing. So I really think that this was a big turning point, as people say. The country was already shifting to the right politically and culturally. Young people were finding their way to the Republican Party through Donald Trump and people like Charlie Kirk.
He made it seem really cool to be God-fearing and committed to your wife and your children. He was such a role model in that way, especially as the cool factor of being on the left has really started to wane.
That shift, that cultural shift, is huge. I’m so shocked by it. I continue to be shocked by it even though I noticed it a year ago – people who set the tone of the culture, whether they are entertainers or athletes — we had athletes doing the YMCA dance, right? That is a sign that there is a cool factor associated with the right now, and I think that’s going to have really big implications. Young people are lonely, and there’s a side that’s offering them a solution to that — belonging, meaning, significance, (the sense that) you matter. And I think Charlie represented that, and I think his death may have accelerated the work that he was doing.
DN: There is this problem, though, of young men and young women being at odds ideologically, which can be a problem for young Americans who want to get married.
Ungar-Sargon: There is a big divide, and I think a lot of it stems from economics. Women are 15 times more likely to get a college degree, and for a long time, that meant that they were much more likely to have access to the American dream. For a long time, having a college degree was that ticket into the middle class. And if women have more access to that than men, you’re going to have a marriage crisis, because when women get that access, they still want somebody who’s out-earning them, right?
I do think we are seeing a cultural shift — men were told for a long time that masculinity was a crime and they couldn’t be proud to be men and they couldn’t aspire to be providers. I do think the example of people like Charlie and Erika Kirk provide a countervailing balance to that. The economy that Donald Trump is building is one in which men who haven’t gone to college, people who work with their hands for a living, can start to believe in the American dream again.
It’s not there yet, but that’s very much underlying the tariff agenda, the immigration policy — all of this is meant to protect the value of the labor of the American working class. And so hopefully what we’ll see is men being able to aspire to that American dream again, becoming confident again in their masculinity. ... It is my experience that even liberal women want a strong man, and that was something that was verboten to say for a long time, because of some of the feminist overreach where the language around men and women was that marriage was a patriarchal, antiquated institution and so forth. ... But, the idea of being able to respect our differences, whether they’re gender differences or whether they’re political differences, is the future.
DN: I know you are married, but you don’t talk about your personal life much.
Ungar-Sargon: I am married to the love of my life; we’ve been together for 15 years and we got married during the pandemic. We’re madly in love, but he’s very, very private. He’s not on social media, and he hates it when I post about him.
He’s my greatest intellectual challenge. He reads everything I write, and every idea that I bring out in the world has been endlessly debated with him because we don’t agree on politics much. But because he’s so brilliant, it gives me a lot of confidence going out knowing that I’ve already faced the greatest challenge I’m going to face. There’s nothing I can get out there that is going to be worse than his criticism or his critique of my ideas, so it gives you a lot of confidence knowing where the other side is going to hit you from.
DN: So does that mean you cancel each other’s votes out?
Ungar-Sargon: My husband’s a Libertarian, and in the last election, he voted for Trump because when he saw the raid on Mar-a-Lago, he was so enraged by that and the lawfare, which he thought was very un-American.
DN: You are a strong supporter of the president right now, but is there any scenario in the future where you might become a Democrat again?
Ungar-Sargon: It really depends on where the party goes. The Republicans are not great on health care and they might get better on it, but right now, instead of finding more ways to get more Americans access to high quality healthcare, they brought in RFK Jr.
To me, that’s a real problem. Babies die of measles. And people in my community have uncles who were deaf and blind and mute because they got mumps. Who is more vulnerable than our babies? That’s going to be a big sticking point for me going forward.
And I think the Republicans are going to have a real problem with women, including very religious women like me, if they want to pursue a national abortion ban. First of all, Jews don’t believe life begins at conception, so that would be at odds with my religion. But I also think the right radically underestimates the degree to which Trump neutralized the issue of abortion because he made it clear that he opposed an abortion ban.
As for the future of the Republican bench, there are people there who are going to find it much harder to convince women, including very religious women like myself, that they would not pursue a national abortion ban.
If the next generation of the GOP goes back to the sort of free trade, amnesty-for-illegals economic agenda, or the nation-building, regime-change agenda on foreign policy, I could see myself going back. Trump really took an ax to the three main planks of the Reagan GOP. He’s not a social conservative, he’s a social moderate, so he’s very pro-gay marriage, he believes abortion should be legal for 12 weeks. He’s anti-woke; he’s anti-war; and he’s not free trade — he thinks it’s sort of a scam that harms American workers, and that’s what I think.
So to me, he sort of stole the FDR agenda from the Democrats, which is why he got the working class. That’s their agenda. And I could see the GOP not learning this lesson, if they go back to someone like Nikki Haley who wants to go back to all three of those things that Trump did away with.
DN: Do you see Donald Trump as a singular personality within the GOP? Meaning, can the MAGA coalition hold once he leaves office?
Ungar-Sargon: Susie Wiles had this great quote where she said, “In 2024, our job was to convert Democrats to Donald Trump, and in 2028, our job is to convert Trump voters to Republicans.”
It’s an uphill battle. And it very much depends on who they choose. It’s not clear who the heir apparent is. Everybody thinks it’s clear, but it’s not clear at all. It’s going to be a great and interesting primary on both sides. For the first time, the largest sector of Americans call themselves independents. They’re very open-minded, and they’re looking for people who they feel care about them and their struggles and their families and their children. And care about this country. ...
I could easily see some smart Democrat saying, “You know what? Controlling the border, limiting immigration, tariffs, this used to be our stuff. Abortion, safe, legal and rare — that was our line! Why shouldn’t we be the inheritors of the MAGA movement?“ They probably won’t, but they should. A lot of the ideas here are really good ideas that I think both sides are going to be picking up on, so it’s very interesting to see where we’re going to go from here.
DN: Being on a cable news network but also very much present in new media, how do you think the media is changing and evolving right now?
Ungar-Sargon: A lot has changed. Trump shifted the Overton window so now you can say the things that are true, and I think that’s really important, because it’s very radicalizing to be told you cannot say the things that you see are true with your own eyes.
A lot of people just tune out The New York Times and CNN; they’re so far left, they’re so out of touch with where the average American’s moral compass tells them is the right place to be. ... It’s very clear that we’ve moved into the next moment. We’ve moved on as a nation. And that in large part has to do with the fact that Trump won, and he won in such a big way. So many Democrats voted for him. Millions of people in swing states across the country. So I think things have really shifted.
The Democratic primary in 2028 is going to be so unbelievably bruising. And the question for the mainstream media is: they’re always on the side of the Democrats, right? So which side of the Democrats are they going to pick? Are they going to pick the Jared Polis, Gretchen Whitmer, Rahm Emanuel common-ground side, or are they going to pick the Gavin Newsom, AOC, burn-it-to-the-ground-Trump-is-Hitler version of things. That divide is going to be uglier than anything they’ve lobbed at the right. That’s my prediction.
How does The New York Times navigate that? Are they going to appeal to the radical left, or are they going to appeal to the people trying to bring the party back to the center? And that’s going to be extremely interesting to watch.