[This article is adapted from the video “‘MAGA Lefty’ Makes Kyle Want to Put His Nuts In a Waffle Iron.”]

Recently, political commentator Batya Ungar-Sargon made what is possibly one of the least true statements ever made about American politics. Explaining why she supports Donald Trump while considering herself a “leftist,” Ungar-Sargon said that “Democrats are struggling [because] Trump stole their New Deal agenda, outflanking them to the Left with pro-worker economics and anti-war foreign policy, so they decided to fight him by defending men exposing themselves in girls locker rooms.” On Bill Maher’s HBO show, Ungar-Sargon said she was a “MAGA Lefty” because “Trump’s agenda is everything I believe in: pro-worker, anti-war, pro-gay, Americans First. This was the Democrats’ agenda for a century. Now it’s Trump’s.” She says that the core belief of “the labor left” is that the working class “is the backbone of any society… along with all the other stuff being anti-war, being pro-free speech. This was all left stuff, and now it's MAGA stuff.” She added that “basically, you have a New Deal Democrat in Trump.”

Truly, what is it about Donald Trump that causes some people to shut their brains off entirely? What is it about this man that makes people stop thinking critically and actually analyzing evidence, data, and reality? 

To say that a “MAGA lefty” position is not a thing is the understatement of the century. It requires a total willful ignorance of everything Trump is actually doing in office. It’s only possible to portray Trump as a pro-worker, anti-war “New Deal Democrat” if you assess Trump by what he says at rallies (“[Liz Cheney is] a radical war hawk,” etc.”), or the vibes he tries to give off, and not by his actual policies. 

So let’s look at what this “New Deal Democrat” has actually done, how he has supposedly seized the mantle of economic populism and pro-worker politics from the Democratic Party. Let’s fulfill the one basic duty of a political commentator, which is to try to understand what is actually happening in the world and not just repeat what politicians are saying.

• Just last week, Trump cut the minimum wage for federal contractors, “rolling back a boost that helped hundreds of thousands of workers” including “janitors and food service workers.” A billionaire cutting the pay of minimum wage workers. Does that sound like “the labor left”? 
• Trump is destroying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, America’s anti-scam police, which makes sure consumers don’t get defrauded by big banks and Wall Street. The CFPB has returned $20 billion to defrauded Americans, but Elon Musk has promised to end it. (“RIP CFPB,” he tweeted, while spreading lies about what the agency does.) In his first term, Trump killed the fiduciary rule that would require financial advisers to act in the best interest of their clients, which led to a rise in the sale of questionable financial products. 
• In his first term, Trump immediately began rolling back regulations that protected worker health and wages. Trump waged an “unprecedented” assault on worker rights, using the National Labor Relations Board to undermine the right to organize a union. Trump believes striking workers should be fired. He rolled back workplace safety inspections, resulting in unnecessary deaths. 
• Now, Trump has “paralyzed” the NLRB, which is responsible for protecting workers’ organizing rights. He plans to pick a union-busting attorney to be the NLRB’s general counsel. Employment lawyers have predicted that Trump’s return to power will mean fewer restrictions on employer surveillance of workers and less accountability for unfair labor practices. 
• Trump’s “populist” vice president, JD Vance, has consistently opposed the PRO Act that is one of the labor movement’s central priorities, which would make it easier for workers to organize. Trump himself has not supported the act, and his Labor Secretary has distanced herself from it. The Trump administration is making it virtually impossible for the Department of Labor to issue new regulations on employers. 
• Trump opposes a minimum wage increase. “How are you helping your small businesses when you’re forcing wages?,” he asked in 2020. 
• Trump outsourced 200,000 factory jobs in his first term alone. “I believed it. I thought he was going to save some jobs. He pulled the wool right over our eyes and he’s still doing it till this day,” said a worker whose job was sent to Mexico. 
• Trump picked an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration, meaning his administration is comprised of not just the “1 percent,” but the .0001 percent. Trump rewards wealthy donors with favors and opportunities to further enrich themselves. 
• Trump is weakening Social Security by closing local offices, cutting staff, and imposing onerous new requirements on beneficiaries, creating a serious new threat to the system. Elon Musk has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme (it isn’t), and the long-term Republican plan is still to cut benefits, which some Republican politicians are more honest than others about. Trump’s Commerce Secretary has even suggested that only fraudsters would complain about a missed Social Security check. 
• Medicare and Medicaid are on the table for cuts. House Republicans just passed a budget with deep cuts to Medicaid. Trump supports that bill. While Trump explicitly promised not to touch Medicare or Social Security, his Commerce Secretary is now calling them “tax scams” and promising massive cuts. 
• Trump has vowed to kill the bipartisan CHIPS Act, which is intended to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry and produce over 100,000 jobs. 
• Trump’s plans for “tax cuts” actually only cut taxes for the wealthy, while raising taxes on the bottom 95% of Americans. In other words he is robbing the poor and middle class to pay the rich. 
• While Trump now makes much of his “no taxes on tips” plan, in his first term he supported a rule that would allow employers to steal workers’ tips. 
• In 2019, Trump prevented millions of workers from being able to claim overtime. Trump has claimed that as an employer he hated paying overtime, and even admitted he would “get other people in” to avoid it.  
• 2.3 million people lost health insurance in Trump's first term, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths. 
• And of course, he explicitly opposes universal health care.

So much for a “New Deal presidency.” The bare minimum to be on the pro-labor left is to support a $15 federal minimum wage, universal healthcare, and strong labor protections. Trump opposes all of that. As the AFL-CIO noted in 2023, Trump had a “catastrophic and devastating anti-labor track record,” and his “rhetoric doesn’t match reality.”

Even Ungar-Sargon’s point about tariffs doesn’t hold up. Tariffs, applied carefully, can be a tool for building up domestic industrial capacity. But that’s not what Trump is doing. Many of his tariffs have no upside for Americans, to the point where he has stopped promising to usher in an economic golden age and started warning that pain and sacrifice might be inevitable. The New Deal was about using the power of government to deliver gains for the American people and prevent economic suffering. Trump’s erratic, unpredictable tariffs do the opposite, hitting Americans with rising prices, as this farmer who depends on supplies from Canada explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the effects of Trump’s policies on his business. 

What about foreign policy? Trump has promised to be a “peacemaker” who will “stop all wars.” That’s what he says. What does he do? 

• In his first term in office, Trump massively escalated the use of drone strikes, and eliminated reporting requirements for drone deaths. People had called Barack Obama the drone president. Trump blew Obama’s record out of the water.
• Trump kept us in Iraq. When the Iraqi government tried to expel U.S. troops, Trump threatened them with sanctions. 
• Trump kept us in Afghanistan. The number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan skyrocketed under Trump by 330 percent, due to his relaxation of the rules of engagement. He even dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan, the most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever used by the U.S. in combat. The bomb reportedly killed a teacher and his young son, and was not used by the George W. Bush administration for fear it would inevitably cause civilian casualties. Trump’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan was, as his own acting defense secretary admitted, a ruse that he never intended to follow through on. It was left to Biden to finally end the horrific 20-year war there. 
• Trump consistently increased the already massively bloated Pentagon budget.
• While Trump criticizes the military-industrial complex in speeches, as Politico notes, his “record tells a different story,” and in the first term “all three of his hand-picked defense secretaries had ties to the defense industry.” In fact, “Nearly half of senior Defense Department officials are connected to military contractors,” and “Trump has made the purchase, public display and foreign sales of military hardware a major priority of his administration. In fact, National Security Action calls the idea that Trump is taking on the weapons industry “pure fantasy,” noting that “Trump has consistently prioritized the financial interests of America’s defense contractors.”
• Trump tried to coordinate a coup in Venezuela, later saying that he wanted to “take over” the country and get “all of that oil.” Warmongers in his administration pushed for a “military option” to overthrow the Venezuelan government, because it was, according to Mike Pompeo, in “violation of the Monroe Doctrine” (the idea that the U.S. rules the Western Hemisphere). 
• Trump’s casual threats of nuclear weapons use were, according to the Arms Control Association, “a paradigm shift from how nearly all his predecessors acted in regard to the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” and he pushed for trillions of dollars in new spending on nuclear weapons, accelerating a global arms race that could end civilization. Trump “sabotaged key nuclear arms control agreements of the past and the future” and “single-handedly destroyed the INF Treaty, the Iran nuclear agreement, and the Open Skies Treaty by withdrawing the United States from them.”
• Trump bombed Syria twice. He said that the U.S. military presence in Syria was explicitly for the purpose of stealing the country’s oil, a war crime. 
• He armed Saudi Arabia as they committed a genocide in Yemen, and vetoed three bills to cut off the weapons to them.
• Trump has publicly proposed invading Mexico, asking advisers for “battle plans” to “attack Mexico.”  
• In his first term, he hired John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, all neoconservative warmongers, and let them run his foreign policy. In this term, Trump has appointed Pete Hegseth, a viciously anti-Muslim bigot who wants a new “crusade” against Islam, as his Secretary of Defense, and neoconservative warmonger Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State. Rubio is pushing an aggressive stance towards China that could well drive the U.S. closer to an outright war. 
• In 2017, his very first military raid as president killed an 8-year-old American girl.
• He pardoned the Blackwater war criminals who carried out the Nisour Square massacre, killing 14 Iraqi civilians.
• Trump promised to introduce torture tactics a “hell of a lot worse” than those infamously used by the George W. Bush administration, and then signed pro-torture executive orders clearing the path for a return to the use of black sites and the elimination of restrictions on coercive interrogation.
• He said we should not just kill terrorists, but also “take out their families.”
• Trump is already bombing Somalia, and upon retaking office quickly “made a policy shift that eased restrictions on U.S. commanders in a way that enables them to authorize strikes and certain special operation raids beyond conventional battlefields — and essentially expanded the pool of people who can be targeted.” 
• He is now also bombing Yemen, and has promised the Houthis there will be “completely annihilated.” 
• Trump just supported Israel in breaking the Gaza ceasefire and massacring 700 Palestinians including many women and children. Trump tore up the Biden administration’s requirement that Israel comply with international law in its use of U.S. arms (although the Biden administration did not enforce the requirement). Trump believed Biden somehow didn’t support Israel enough and thought Israel needed to be allowed to “finish the job.” In his first term, he let Israel illegally annex the Golan Heights, which is Syrian territory. Netanyahu even named an Israeli settlement after him in gratitude. Trump took $100 million from Miriam Adelson, with the quid pro quo of letting Israel annex the West Bank. His plan for Gaza is to launch a full ethnic cleansing operation, seize the territory for the United States, and build a Trump resort there. 
• Trump now talks openly in the language of 19th century imperialism. He wants to annex Canada, seize Greenland from Denmark, and take back the Panama Canal.

Does any of this sound “anti-war” to you? 

Finally, what about Ungar-Sargon’s contention that Trump believes in “free speech”? Organizations on the left like the ACLU and the Center For Constitutional Rights have a long history of advocating for strong civil liberties protections. It’s something leftists care about. So what’s the Trump record on matters of free speech and civil liberties? 

This, too, is a joke. While Trump has promised to “restore free speech to America” and “end federal censorship,” once again the fraud becomes obvious the moment we look at actions rather than just words. Trump promised a lawless presidency and he is delivering one. He is blatantly punishing permanent residents for constitutionally protected political speech, disregarding basic due process and the First Amendment in an effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil and others like him for what the administration itself admits is just “basically pro-Palestinian activity.” Trump appears to be trying to ban critics of his administration from entering the country, and even expelled the South African ambassador for criticizing him. He has withheld federal funding from Columbia University, only being willing to restore it if the university commits to cracking down on protest and policing the scholarship of the Middle Eastern studies department. Trump ally and DOGE head Elon Musk, himself a supposed champion of free speech, is now promising to sue ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman for making the accurate observation that Musk is a thief and a Nazi. The Attorney General has warned members of Congress to “tread very carefully” when criticizing Musk, and Trump has punished journalists who refuse to adopt his personal redefinitions of geography (“Gulf of America”). 

None of this is meant to defend the record of Democrats, of course, or to argue that the legacy of FDR is alive and well on the other side. It is true, as writers like Thomas Frank and Adolph Reed Jr. have long pointed out, that mainstream Democrats have abandoned core New Deal values and sold out to Wall Street. Joe Biden deserves credit for a number of pro-worker policies and the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but his support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza was reprehensible and his economic policies still left much to be desired. What should be clear to anyone with a basic understanding of political reality, however, is that Trump is in no way better than the centrist Democrats. He is much, much worse. 

To those both disappointed by the weakness of centrist Democrats and horrified by the naked plutocracy of Trump, there is an obvious path forward: the Bernie agenda, which is authentically anti-oligarchy. Instead of using mildly pro-worker rhetoric, it offers real gains for people. Higher minimum wages, free college, and universal healthcare. Anyone who believes, as Ungar-Sargon says she does, that workers’ interests should come first, can never go MAGA. MAGA is the enemy of everything that would help ordinary people throw off oligarchic rule. 

If you think Trump is “pro-worker” because he bashes NAFTA, you are a sucker. If you think Trump is “anti-war” because he called the Cheneys or Kamala Harris a warmonger, you are a sucker. You should not listen to anything any politician says. It’s what they do that matters. Don’t get caught up in the language. Always look at the actions, not the words.