Is Trump a Lefty in Disguise?
Sift through the anti-Trump rhetoric and you just might be surprised
Ever since their defeat in the November 2024 elections, the Modern Progressive Left has been struggling to reconcile their beliefs that they are “good and right” with the reality that the majority of Americans do not like the direction they were taking the country. In fact, NBC News reports that 44% of Americans feel like the country is headed in the right direction now versus only 27% feeling that way in November. NBC News noted that this was the first time that number exceeded 40% since 2012 and the first time it reached 44% since January 2004.
How can this be? Trump is a convicted criminal. He is the second coming of Hitler. He is going to end Democracy, for crying out loud! These polling numbers suggest that lots of people disagree and they are happy with how things are going.
Let’s explore this a bit.
What is Left of the Left?
Much of Gen-X experienced cultural influences, conveyed through books, television, movies, and other media, that cemented the idea of what “The Left” was. It was shaped strongly by the anti-war, anti-establishment, and civil liberties activism of the 1960’s and 70’s. That evolved over the 80’s and 90’s into broader ideas of liberation, with focus on skepticism of U.S. foreign policies of imperialism, interventionism abroad, and the U.S. security state. There was more emphasis in those days on exploring solutions to problems like income/wealth inequality.
Somewhere along the way, a metamorphosis was necessary for the defining values of The Left to transition away an anti-establishment mentality, a willingness to protest the overreach of the U.S. and other Western governments, and stands against policies and conditions that result in imbalances of wealth distribution based on race, gender, or class. And what did the focus of The Left transition to? Pronouns and bathrooms. Policy that aims to guarantee that everyone will end up in the same place (equity) over guaranteeing that everyone is treated fairly (equality). Support for war in distant lands. Defining who people are based on characteristics that they were born with and have no control over, such as gender at birth and skin pigmentation. These concepts really began to take shape in the late 80’s and early 90’s during the “political correctness” campaign. These became the defining values of The Left in recent years — or, more specifically, The “Woke” Left.
But what is the definition of Woke? That is more nebulous than those values that have arisen from the Woke movement. Woke seems to be an extension of more traditionally Leftist emotions of standing against oppression and standing with the oppressed, but it is a bastardized version of the traditional Left.
The Democratic Party has long been the party most aligned with the values of The Left and it is a party that allowed the emergence of Wokeism into its agenda. The U.S. has rejected Woke and, thus, the Democratic Party. That is at the heart of why people are happier now with the direction of the country is going as compared to November — America likes going in a sane direction.
A MAGA Leftist??
Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Second Class - How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, recently appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher. Bill set the stage for Batya by noting that she was always a kind of “not crazy” conservative but has more recently morphed from “leaning right” to “Trump supporter” and asked if she now feels like things are going badly. Batya responded:
“I was never a Republican or a conservative, I was a Leftist and I am still a Leftist. I’m just a MAGA Leftist now because… When I look at what President Trump ran on and the agenda 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 axe to all of those. During the campaign he said… look, he’s pretty pro-gay, that’s pretty obvious. He appointed the highest ranking out gay person in Scott Bissent, our Secretary of Treasury, which is incredible. And he sidelined the pro-life wing of his party… On foreign intervention, he is anti-war. He is trying to bring an end to all of these wars, okay...
“You know, he is on the other side of another party that is pretty pro-war and wants to keep the war going, right? The third point is… he is not free trade. He 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. And he looked at why that was, which was there was handshake agreement between both parties that we should somehow have free trade, which resulted in shipping five million good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico’s middle class…
“What they did was they brought in millions and millions of illegal migrants to compete with the jobs that remained here. And what Donald Trump said was we have to stop selling out the working class. That agenda that he laid out: socially moderate, anti-war, and anti-free trade protectionist — that is a Leftist agenda.”
Are these points valid? Is President Trump implementing a Leftist agenda? His cabinet is filled largely with Leftists and moderates, with very few who represent deeply conservative values. Before looking at the actual policies, it makes sense that surrounding himself with Leftist advisers would lean Trump in a Leftist direction.
Batya further discussed tariffs:
“Asset rich Americans are controlling over 50% of the GDP and they have left the working class out of all of that prosperity that was generated. That manufacturing is still being done, it is just being done in other countries… That’s what the tariffs are for. They are to make American workers more competitive in the global market. Why are we accepting there should be a race to the bottom? You know, China — what is its competitive advantage over us? It’s that it pays slave wages. Why should we accept that? They’re still manufacturing our PPE, our pharmaceuticals, our cars. They’re making all that stuff. Trump says there are five industries that we cannot have any kind of national security without having a stake in them: pharmaceuticals, lumber, steel, aluminum, and - um, I forgot what the fifth one was, but these are really important that we have a stake in the manufacturing of the things that we need as a nation so that when China decides that it wants to go to war against us, we’re not relying on them for steel and aluminum in order to fight them… Right now, who is so upset right now? It’s the stock market, right? It’s rich people… Of course rich people are angry. They’re supposed to be. This is class warfare on behalf of the working class by our president.”
Is there logic to this explanation? Is it conceivable that (in addition to economic leverage over other countries) tariffs can help American workers be more competitive with workers in other countries? Is America more or less vulnerable when manufacture of goods that are critical to our prosperity is centered in other countries? The COVID pandemic exposed a vulnerability with respect to the high demand for N95 masks because they were primarily produced in China, China limited their export do help address their own need for those goods, and there was a significant shortage. Do we want to learn from those dark times?
Eliminating Income Tax
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick commented in a recent interview that President Trump wishes to eliminate income tax for the majority of Americans:
"I know what his (Donald Trump’s) goal is ... no tax, for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year. That's his goal. That's what I'm working for."
The whole idea here is a shift from internal revenue (out of the wallets of Americans) for the federal government to external revenue in the form of tariffs. With all of the inflammatory conversations about tariffs, it is important to understand the goals (which Batya helped elucidate above):
The American working class cannot compete with the low wages of workers in many foreign countries.
Foreign made goods are imported to the U.S. and provided to consumers at low prices.
Over time, more and more manufacturing has transitioned out of the U.S., leaving a shortage of jobs for the American working class.
Tariffs will increase the cost of foreign made goods to the consumer, making it more desirable to manufacture the goods in the U.S.
Those tariffs will go toward funding the (ideally increasingly efficient) U.S. government, enabling a reduction/elimination of income tax — especially at the lowest income levels.
The market will respond to the need for American-made goods, resulting in more jobs and higher wages.
Now, in April 2024, the top progressives in the House of Representatives announced their 2025 agenda, which Representative Jayapal explained was “really about worker power and raising wages and lowering costs for poor people, middle-class Americans and the working people across this country.” If the Trump policy succeeds in overhauling the economy, creating American jobs, eliminating income tax, and increasing wages, how far out of step is that policy with the progressive agenda?
Tariffs are part of a strategy that prioritizes the American worker over the economies of other countries. The question here is: Can it work?
One hitch in the tariff strategy to increase American jobs is the momentum of American manufacturing towards automation. As wages go up, we see more and more automation of lower wage jobs. We even see this in the form of touch screen kiosks at restaurants such as McDonald’s and Panera. Most industries stand to see efficiency gains as things become more automated and those automations typically make certain workers obsolete.
Combine that trend with the advent of artificial intelligence and we seem poised to eliminate a lot more of the working class jobs. Is the appropriate response then to keep those jobs in the economies of foreign nations or bring as much back to the U.S. as possible to help make up for the disappearance of jobs due to technological advancements?
Hopeful Solutions
One of drums that we here at Meet Me in the Middle consistently beat is the need for solutions that have a hope of success. We assert that party affiliation, ideology, feelings/emotions — none of those matter if we keep failing to solve problems. From the far Left, throughout the middle, and all the way to the far Right, there is an over abundance of ideas to solve problems that will NEVER work. There are plenty of reasons to be critical of Donald Trump, but it is important to ask the question of whether his approach to things have any hope of success. It is also important to contrast his approach with other approaches that have failed.
While Trump seems to be pursuing some seemingly wild, off-the-wall goals. The talking heads are scrambling to challenge Trump and his administration on many of his moves. He is certainly taking an “outside the box” approach to many of the challenges that he feels like he was elected to address. For a lot of these challenges, he generally has the support of the majority of the American citizens. Despite that support, Trump’s opposition (from the progressive Left) is tying themselves in knots to find a way to attack his solutions.
Let us take a look at an example: deportation of members of violent Central American gangs, such as MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. The support among American citizens for deporting violent Central American gang members has been quite high for years, on the order of 85-90%. President Trump began sending planes full of violent gang members to a prison in El Salvador. Yet a judge, in an apparent overreach of power, ordered the president to stop. And the mainstream media painted Trump as racist and as having no respect for the rule of law.
The U.S. is facing a problem in need of a solution: Overpopulated prisons (Part 1 of the problem) and high costs of incarceration (Part 2) combined with unusually high levels of Central American gang members (Part 3) who are being arrested more frequently under the Trump administration. So, Trump is taking a multi-faceted approach to addressing the multiple parts of this problem:
He is deterring more violent gang members from entering the U.S. in the first place.
He has arranged for apprehended violent criminals to be imprisoned without adding burden to an already overburdened prison system.
These criminals are being sent to El Salvador where they can be imprisoned for a fraction of the cost of our own prison system.
Setting aside whose policy is responsible for these problems arising in the first place and setting aside personal conflicts associated with party affiliation, ideology, and feelings/emotions, just answer this one simple question: Does this Trump administration solution have HOPE OF SUCCESS?
Instead of celebrating Trump for taking action to satisfy 85% of Americans — or even simply acknowledging that his actions are in tune with the will of America — the president’s detractors are intent on attacking him. This is the same mentality as the “anyone but Trump” voting block during the election — whether he does something good or not, he will NEVER have an ounce of support from them. These are not “meet me in the middle” kinds of people.
It Is HOW They Are Doing It
A common refrain when the two opposing political and cultural sides of the spectrum is, “It is not about what they are trying to do, it is about how they are doing it.”
Consider the battle against oppression and the feeling that the U.S. should not be intervening with and even destroying governments on the other side of the world — both of which are issues that the middle 80% (or more) of Americans generally agree on. There is consensus on the need for a solution, but not on the approach to solving the problem. Right-leaning voters, for instance, largely want to see an end to oppression against all minorities, but they do not like tactics such as rioting in the streets, looting, and burning down buildings. Meanwhile, there are plenty of left-leaning folks who acknowledge that the role of the U.S. government in the destabilization of nations around the world is a problem that will never be corrected if there is nobody willing to dismantle the institutions that drive the problem, but they simply do not like how DOGE is doing business.
If you are critical of either riots and looting or dissolving unchecked institutions through the power of unprecedented transparency into government spending, what is your preferred alternative? What has worked in the past? Well, in terms of civil rights, a case can be made that vocal activism, intelligent discourse, and even peaceful protests have been far more effective. In terms of addressing the power of government agencies (like the CIA and USAID) that do not have any meaningful oversight from lawmakers, a case can be made that nothing has ever worked (if any effort has ever been made in earnest).
So, if America has a problem that the majority of Americans agree needs to be addressed and it is a problem that the average American believes has never been effectively addressed in any meaningful way, then what is the sources of opposition to a Trump administration solution that happens to have a hope of success? If your response is “I don’t like how they are doing it,” just keep in mind that nobody has been successful before (including Trump’s first term), these are institutions that have traditionally been impervious to changing political winds, and the average American has never before had the opportunity to actually see and understand the corruption.
Bringing It On Home
There have been a lot of terms bandied about to describe Donald Trump: dictator, autocrat, oligarch, nationalist, fascist, Nazi. But “progressive” is not one that comes up very often. Maybe it should.
[Side note: We recently wrote about how the meaning of a word can vary depending on one’s social/political preferences, or depending on when the word was defined. We bring this up because “fascism,” a word frequently used to attack Donald Trump, is another of those words. The modern definition is “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocrat government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.” The 1971 definition was “a system of government characterized by dictatorship, belligerent nationalism and racism, glorification of war, etc.” The modern definition seems tailored to match the modern attacks on Trump, whereas the 1971 definition seems to better describe the Biden administration. Indeed, dictatorship (vaccine mandates and squashing free speech), racist policies (DEI), and a fixation on war (refusing to seek peace between Ukraine and Russia or between Israel and Gaza) all became characteristics of the Biden regime. Our advice: Tune it out when you hear the word; it has been reduced to meaningless propaganda.]
Regardless of the anti-Trump narrative, is there a case to be made that Trump actually presides as a progressive?
Just to recap the traditional ideals and characteristics of the pre-Woke progressives:
Progressives used to be anti-war, anti-establishment, and civil liberties activists
Progressives used to be skeptical of U.S. foreign policies of imperialism, interventionism abroad, and the U.S. security state
Progressives used to emphasize solutions to inequality, especially with respect to wealth and income
Trump is actively trying to end wars (although the anti-war theme has seen a setback as he recently began a retaliatory bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen). His administration is actively attacking the establishment by exposing corruption and wasteful spending across the government. As for civil liberties, Trump’s rhetoric is often in conflict with his executive actions — he denounces bigotry of all kinds and promotes free speech, but has also demonstrated a willingness to stretch the limits of due process.
Trump’s current foreign policy does not seem to demonstrate “skepticism” of imperialism. In fact, he has openly talked about making Canada the 51st state of the union, buying Greenland, and taking control of Gaza to rebuild it into some sort of Vegas of the Middle East. And then there is the whole “Gulf of America” silliness. As for anti-interventionism, Trump has expressed a desire to get the U.S. out of the internal business of other countries and to put an end to the U.S. practice of regime change — he has demonstrated this through his attempts to gut USAID. While he has work to do in terms of affecting the U.S. security state, at the very least he has installed leadership that seems aligned with such a classically progressive idea.
With respect to inequality, Trump made a truly progressive move by extracting all diversity, equity, and inclusion based verbiage from government. He reversed affirmative action policies, which are based necessarily on unequal treatment based on race. This was a rapid, sweeping, and successful policy implementation that made an immediate impact across government. Ultimately, he restored equal treatment as the law of the land.
So, yes, there is a case to be made that the second Trump term is a progressive one. Even in areas where that case is weakest, he is still more progressive than the last couple of “progressive” presidents (Obama and Biden), both of whom had shockingly non-progressive foreign policies. Maybe once the dust settles on some of his more alarming moves, people will begin to see for themselves whether Trump’s presidency truly is a progressive one.