Batya Ungar-Sargon On Trump 2.0

We debate the tariffs, the BBB, deportations over speech, and more. Things get testy.

Batya is a journalist and author. She’s a columnist for The Free Press, a co-host of The Group Chat on 2Way, and the author of two books: Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, and Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. Her forthcoming book is about, as she puts it, “why Jews are Democrats and why the left turned on the Jews.”

For two clips of our convo — on Trump’s class warfare, and deporting non-citizens over speech — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised in an Orthodox family; debating issues with her parents and five siblings during Shabbat; spending high school in Israel; same-sex education; the mikveh; how sexual desire is better with limitations; becoming secular for a decade; getting a PhD in English literature; her “accidental” entry into journalism during Hurricane Sandy; the Great Awokening in media; Trump’s despicable character; his fickle tariffs; his tax cuts; Congress ceding power to Trump; Biden’s tariffs; his investment in factories and infrastructure; his disastrous immigration policy; Batya’s evolving views on Trump; marriage equality; Bostock; trans activist ideology; Trump’s EO on trans servicemembers; Scott Bessent; the overreach of neoliberalism; Adam Smith; the tax cuts in the BBB; crypto; defunding science at Harvard; gutting USAID; the State Dept’s AI surveillance; the 1952 McCarthyite law; Öztürk and Khalil; UNRWA and Gaza; Israel striking Iran; and the possibility of regime change.

There were eight clashes over facts in the episode. Chris ran them through Grok, which one presumes would not be too biased against Trump. Here’s where we end up:

1. Andrew: What about the EU; where we are with them [on the tariff rate]?

   Batya: 10%

   Andrew: No, it’s not 10% for the EU, that’s not right. He’s proposing something much bigger, isn’t it? 25% for the EU — not Britain, which is 10%, but the EU as a whole.

Grok:

1. Batya: I mean a million people have self-deported out of the workforce…

Andrew: Where’s the number of a million people self deporting come from?

Batya: That was in the Washington Post a couple of days ago.

Andrew: Really? How do they know that? What is that? Is that just people leaving the country? That does not include —

Batya: People taking the administration up on its offer to self-deport and reapply from home.

Grok:

1. Batya: You don’t mean people, you mean people on visas.

Andrew: People who are noncitizens, who are in this country, who are as covered by the First Amendment as any citizen.

Batya: Well, the Supreme Court has gone back and forth on that.

Andrew: No, it hasn’t. It is absolutely clear that the First Amendment applies to every person in the United States.

Grok:

1. Andrew: A law [the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952] that was used, by the way, to punish Holocaust survivors who were accused of being commies. Were you in favor of that when it was passed?

Batya: I think that if it is the law right now, then the administration has the right to use —

Andrew: Then you were fine with it back then in 1952.

Batya: I don’t remember any stories about —

Andrew: It’s McCarthyite law and you have no problem with McCarthyite laws but you’re supposed to be in favor of free speech.

Batya: There were no Holocaust survivors attacked by it.

Grok:

1. Batya: You called me a liar for telling you a fact that the Biden administration deemed UNRWA, which Khalil worked for, to be a terrorist organization. That’s a fact. That’s not a lie.

Grok:

On Khalil’s connection to UNRWA:

1. Andrew: I’m not going to get into the particular details of Khalil because you guys are intent on getting to this guy. Whatever happens to him —

Batya: What do you mean by “you guys”? What does that even mean?

Andrew: The Trump administration and the Israel lobby.

Batya: I’m not the administration and I’m not part of the Israel lobby.

Andrew: You absolutely are, Batya.

Grok:

1. Andrew: There’s nothing that country will do that you will ever criticize, and nothing this country will do that is against the interest of that country that you will support.

Batya: That’s just, I mean, I criticize Israel all the time. Are you familiar with my writing?

Andrew: I am actually, yes.

Grok:

1. Andrew: This is a golden moment, right? It’s finally the war with Iran, is finally going to happen. Just like the war with the Iraq, the two main wars have proposed by neoconservatives the last 30 years. How do you feel? You’re gonna get the war.

Batya: I mean, you’ve obviously never read anything I’ve written, or you’re obviously not familiar with any of my views…

Grok:

You should listen and, with these independent sources in mind, decide for yourself on the facts. I think I missed the mark a little a couple of times, but was specifically wrong in assuming that Batya was all in on the war against Iran and always had been. I apologize for that — and for getting a bit too amped up. I should try not to do that when I’m a host and I hope Batya will forgive me. But a vast amount of the chat was nonetheless delightful — and this is a stressful time.

Coming up on the Dishcast: Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Thomas Mallon on the AIDS crisis, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. (NS Lyons has indefinitely postponed a pod appearance — and his own substack — because he just accepted an appointment at the State Department; and the Arthur Brooks pod is postponed because of calendar conflicts.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Chris Matthews:

LOVED this episode. I really miss Hardball. It was my favorite part of MSNBC. He’s a walking political encyclopedia. Just a great interview, thank you.

Another fan writes:

Oh man, in addition to being a great conversation, the Chris Matthews pod hit me at a point of reflection — and inflection — in my life. My youngest just graduated from high school here in the Northern Virginia suburbs, and I’ve kind of had it with living in our nation’s capital. So we just sold our house, and I’m taking my NJ-born, retired Marine husband to my hometown in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

At this point in my life, two of Chris’ topics struck me in different ways. The first was his comment about the patriotism of small-town America. While I would quibble with patriotism being “all they have,” one of the things I’ve most missed living on the East Coast is the deep sense of pride people in small towns have in their country.

I vividly remember standing in the cold rain with my mom and sister at a parade for the 200th birthday of America back in 1976. I was in first grade and mostly bored by the floats from various civic groups. Then the VFW float came by. An old veteran, probably well into his 70s, was standing on top of the float. No raincoat, in the pouring rain, shivering — but standing at attention in his old uniform. My mom thought it was disgraceful that they’d let him do that (she was a nurse), but I was in awe of the man. He clearly was proud to be there. And the crowd went absolutely crazy when he passed.

It’s just one example of how much people there — Republican or Democrat — revere their veterans and their country .

The second point that made me smile was when Chris proclaimed his admiration for Peggy Noonan. Our town was very pro-union — it was a mining and manufacturing town — so I was susceptible to the trash-talking of Reagan going on around me. But my parents always had the TV on when he was giving a speech, and God help me those words were so, so beautiful. He made me proud to be an American.

As I grew up, I realized that Reagan’s words were mostly Peggy Noonan’s, and I became a lifelong fan. I totally embarrassed myself when I finally got to meet her at an event in DC, because I just fan-girled until her staff literally pulled her away.

All to say, thank you to Chris Matthews for both validating my choice to return to a place that may make me uncomfortable with its Trumpiness but retains a love of country that I just ache for; and also for showing that Democrats can love their own country just as intensely as Republicans. I wish they would show it more!

On the McKinley pod, a dissent:

Your discussion with Robert Merry had basically two themes: that President McKinley was an admirable man of great personal integrity, and that he was instrumental in America’s transition to a global power. The former nobody disagrees with.

For the latter, everyone agrees McKinley was the man at the wheel, but the question is whether he actually directed the course or was just the guy on deck when it all happened. You and Merry seem to be taking the “great man” side, but I didn’t hear any analysis that led either of you to this conclusion. Admiral Mahan was mentioned once, in passing. James G Blaine and Benjamin Harrison — both of whom I would say have a better claim to “architect of the American century” — were mentioned not at all.

Yes, it’s part of what Merry calls the McKinley mystery. His is not the only view, of course, but I found it persuasive. Here’s a history professor:

I enjoyed your interesting conversation on McKinley. Yes, he was more significant than most Americans understand, but not necessarily in a good way. Certainly he was the first president to seize territory beyond the continental US. So, in a petty way, he replied to Rudyard Kipling’s call for America to take up “The White Man’s Burden” in “civilizing” non-Western peoples. Previous presidents had been uncomfortable with the unconstitutional seizure of Hawaii by Marines acting at the behest not of the president, but of a gang of fallen-away missionaries’ kids who sought enrich themselves and rule the natives. That didn’t fit with American values of democracy.

McKinley didn’t seem to mind this. Neither did he mind a vicious war in the Philippines, in which the US used torture and scorched-earth tactics to defeat native democratic and nationalist forces after he annexed the territory. All this blood and hypocrisy was excused by his religious nationalism.

But really, McKinley was no better and no worse than any other of the parade of nonentities in the White House after Grant. These generally-forgotten irrelevancies served the interests of the rising class of industrial giants of steel, oil, rail, and banking. The wealth of the nation collected into the hands of this shrinking number of people due to the impersonal forces of mechanization and forces of scale, but this process also took place due to the lack of any meaningful regulatory state and the well-known corruption of Congress.

Young kids labored in coal mines. Literal rat shit and arsenic flavored our sausage. Opium was an ingredient in children’s cough syrup. Workers labored from 12 to 16 hours per day, six days per week. Little attention was paid to worker safety in dangerous factories and mines, and mangled workers were shed without compensation. Our national resources were being pillaged and squandered. Farmers could get no redress, even in times of drought and hunger.

The democratic process was no longer functioning as a check on the power of industrial centralization. Congressmen and governors were openly bought and paid for by corporations. The Supreme Court flatly reinterpreted a bill passed to restrict the power of monopolies into an attack on labor unions. We were in real danger of losing the American dream of upward mobility. McKinley blessed all this through his non-action.

In reaction to the crisis, actual anarchists and communists organized riots and assassinations across the country. The National Guard and Pinkerton agents shot down these radicals as well as more moderate demonstrations by labor unions. And yet, McKinley did nothing to address this crisis.

In the end, he was mostly significant because his assassination opened the door to his vice president — the otherwise unelectable Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt brought the power of the presidency to bear on many of the problems that had been growing under the un-benign neglect of his predecessors. He is now despised by Karl Rove, the 1776 Project, and MAGA for expanding the regulatory state, but his policies responded to the urgent demands of a strong majority of the American people.

Roosevelt was our only great president who was not forced to be either great or a failure, as Washington, Lincoln, and FDR were. He could have ignored the slow-growing crisis, as McKinley had done. He didn’t. Because of his actions, Roosevelt became probably the most popular president during his time of office in all of American history. He is rightly a Mt. Rushmore president.

Man, that cough syrup though. Another history professor touches on the Bill Buckley pod:

As I listened to your conversation with Sam Tanenhaus about William F. Buckley, I noticed that you were interested in the irony of Buckley’s racist views toward African Americans in general, in contrast to his paternalistic intimacy and decency toward the black families who served in his home. This is a Southern theme. Not THE Southern theme, because in my research, I found it largely absent in the western South, in places like Arkansas. And there were plenty of elite families who treated their servants cruelly. But Southern race relations are a hell of a tangle, and this is what Buckley demonstrated.

Here’s a guest rec:

I write to urge you to consider Edward Lucas as a guest for the Dishcast. He was a long-time writer for The Economist, based primarily in Russia and the Baltics, and is now back in his native England. (He’s one of the few journalists to have been interrogated by the KGB.) He’s about as smart as it gets, and has passionately urged the UK and Europe more generally to re-arm to defend against Russia. He started a substack (“Active Measures”) in which he raises a very Churchillian alarm about the state of the UK’s war capability.

A journalist I often learn from. But another Brit?

Thanks as always for the emails, especially the dissents, and send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

See you next Friday.

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