Writer and journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon is raising a red flag for fellow Trump supporters, warning of what she believes is the greatest threat to the MAGA movement. Ungar-Sargon, a columnist for The Free Press and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, made waves recently by declaring herself a “MAGA leftist.” In a conversation with Fox News Digital, she outlined what she sees as the real danger to the movement energized by former President Donald Trump—and it’s not the Democrats.
“I think the biggest threat to the MAGA movement is misunderstanding what Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 was all about,” Ungar-Sargon told Fox News Digital. “The Democrats don’t really pose a threat right now. They have nothing. They’re fundamentally incapable of realizing what they did wrong.” Ungar-Sargon believes Democrats are wandering in the political wilderness in part because they think Trump won only over “trans issues,” but fretted that “a lot of people on the right are making the same mistake.”
“Of course, that was a part of it. But what Trump won on was the idea that we don’t have to live like this, that working class people deserve dignity,” she said. “And that dignity for a lot of working class people comes from economic autonomy, but also cultural and social autonomy. And I think that if the Republicans go back to the pre-Trump version of the party, they’re gonna lose all of that support that they built.”
The Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon warned Republicans not to revert back to the pre-Trump version of the GOP. (Screenshot/HBO)
“Trump made the GOP cool, you know. He made it, like, cool and edgy,” the writer continued. “And if they go back to the old version of the party, which was catering to the rich and the country clubs economically, believed in using American taxpayer dollars to fund wars and programs and trans operas globally, and was socially conservative and believed in taking people’s choices away from them at the social level, they’re gonna lose a lot of the support that he built.”
The Free Press columnist cautioned the conservative base that giving up ground to Democrats on social issues could make them “competitive again” in future elections. “They’re not going to change their ways. They can’t,” Ungar-Sargon said of Democrats. “They’ve lost the working class. They’re catering to a very small elite, an ever-smaller elite, because even that elite is sick of the woke stuff. So some of them are defecting. So I think that really the only mistake that MAGA can make right now is to misunderstand what propelled Trump to victory.”