Donald Trump, Inheritor of the Left and the American Jewish Legacy

It’s been a hard year for American Jews. For generations, many of us have been stalwart members of the Left, proud of our progressive bona fides and the solidarity we have extended those with less power and privilege, both on American soil and globally. American Jews have always had an affinity for the Left. As new arrivals here, we were overwhelmingly working class and brought a keen sense of the injustices suffered in the old country into the labor movement. When the Left shifted its focus from labor activism to civil rights, the persecution we had escaped and the memories of the Holocaust—just 20 years old when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched across the Edmund Pettis Bridge—made American Jews especially outraged at the injustices against Black Americans, whose struggle for equality called upon a wellspring of Biblical texts for support and mirrored our own oppression in Europe. Even as the Left moved into a more identity-based iteration at the end of the twentieth century, progressive American Jews felt it was our role as people with privilege to stand with the oppressed—be they women or LGBTQ communities or undocumented immigrants.

Yet after Hamas‘s October 7 brutal massacre of 1,200 innocent Israelis, many were shocked to find that the Left no longer had an affinity for Jews. American Jews felt abandoned by the Left, which seemed eager to erase, excuse, whitewash, or even celebrate Hamas’s crimes against our brothers and sisters.

For many Jews, it was a shocking wake up call, leaving them feeling politically homeless. I can sympathize: It’s a process I went through five or six years ago myself. That’s when it became clear to me that the Left hadn’t just left us—it had left the very values that drew Jews to the Left in the first place.

Yet since then, I have come to believe that there is an inheritor of those values—especially the pro-labor approach to the economy. The case I’d like to make to you today is that the inheritor of the tradition of American Jews is Donald Trump.

If you’re a progressive Jew and you get your news from the New York Times or MSNBC, you have probably been told that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, that he’s an aspiring dictator, a Hitler wannabe, an authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law and endless contempt for our democracy. You may believe that he will implement a federal abortion ban, that he said Jews are to blame if he loses, that there will be a bloodbath, that he called neo-Nazis “very fine people.”

I understand why this all feels disqualifying. But let’s take the example of Trump calling neo-Nazis “very fine people.” When you watch the full clip, you can see how the media edited it to give you a false impression, cropping the clip before he vociferously condemns white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

There are, unfortunately, many such cases. He promised to veto a national abortion ban. The bloodbath comment was about the auto industry. Watch the clip where Trump said he would be a dictator. Beyond the fact that Trump is making a joke about how he is perceived, the extent of being a dictator that Trump is planning for day one is to implement legal executive orders on the border and on American energy.

More importantly, there is a dividing line in our country between those who believe the narrative about Trump being a unique threat and those who believe the opposite, that he is a champion for our struggling working class. There’s a line dividing those who believe his personality and character should be disqualifying—and those who believe that only a person with such disregard for how he is perceived could have made so many necessary changes to the country. There is a line dividing those who feel that 91 indictments mean that surely he is guilty of something, and those who feel that when there are 91 indictments, they will stop at nothing to get him. And that line is the class divide separating Americans with a college degree from Americans without one.

We’re seeing a historic realignment in American politics. The GOP under Trump’s influence has become the party of the working class—increasingly of all races. From 2016 to 2024, Trump has grown his share of Black and Hispanic voters, especially men without a college degree, to historic levels for a Republican. The mark he’s made on labor is vivid: The Teamsters Union, 1.3 million strong, refused to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris after it became clear that 60 percent of their rank and file were voting for Trump.

This is the case with most labor unions: The Democrats portray themselves as the party of organized labor, yet the majority of rank and file is in Trump’s camp, even as the national leadership continues to endorse the Democratic candidate. We in the laptop class may think that the PRO Act is how you support labor, but it is my view that working people, many of whom are living on a shoestring budget, are the best judges of which president stands for their interests. When you talk to working class voters, as I did for my book Second Class, they can point to the Trump-era policies that put money in their pockets: tariffs, a trade war with China, reshoring of manufacturing, and of course immigration controls, which restricted the supply of labor and resulted in the first wage growth the working class had seen in decades.

But as the working class has defected to the Right, the Democrats began to grow their share of the affluent. Democrats now receive the support of 65 percent of American households making over $500,000 a year. Democrats are the recipients of three quarters of Wall Street donations, and they represent nine of the 10 richest counties in the country. Harris is absolutely dominating with the college-educated, especially college-educated women.

Why did this happen? Why did labor abandon the Democratic Party for Trump?

Because as with the Jews, the Left abandoned them.

Today’s progressive movement is less about labor or rights and more focused on identity, equity, and a sense of responsibility to the global oppressed. It’s why there has been such attrition from the working class: Successive Democratic presidents abandoned a commitment to labor to enhance the economic interests of the college educated and cater to their cultural concerns. It’s why today, the Democrats support late term abortions, free trade, and zero emissions environmental policy, as well as a laxity when it comes to illegal immigration. These are all issues that divide Americans based on class.

Meanwhile, it is Trump, ironically enough, who has inherited many of the issues traditionally associated with the Left. Economically, his protectionist policies on trade and immigration have more in common with the Democrats historically than the free trade Republicans. It was the Democrats—including unions—who historically opposed immigration on the grounds that it hurt workers.

In 2015, Bernie Sanders, the standard bearer of the Left, called open borders a “Koch brothers proposal.” Yet by 2019, Bernie had joined the rest of the Democrats in promising to decriminalize illegal border crossing.

Bernie was right in 2015: Illegal immigration hurts the working class, and a strong border like Trump had gives power to workers at the bottom of the wage spectrum, which is what a 2019 report found: Trump’s economic policy was closing the wage gap: That year, the bottom 25 percent of wage earners saw a 4.5 percent wage increase, but the top 25 percent only say a 2.9 percent increase, meaning Trump was the first president in 60 years to reduce the income gap.

And what about Trump’s alleged racism—his offensive comments about “Black jobs” and his opposition to immigrants? Up until Trump ran for office, it was understood on the Left that mass migration hurts workers, and Black workers most of all. A 2010 study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that “The large immigrant inflow from 1980-2000 resulted in a labor supply shock that increased the number of workers in the U.S. by 10 percent, accounting for 40 percent of the overall 18 percent decline in black employment rates and 10 percent increase in the incarceration rate of black high school dropouts.”

“Illegal immigration has a disproportionately negative effect on the wages and employment levels of blacks, particularly black males,” Peter Kirsanow told the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration in 2016. “The huge number of illegal immigrants ensures that there is a continual surplus of low-skilled labor, preventing wages from rising.” He went on: “The dearth of job opportunities gives these men less confidence in their ability to support a family, and gives women reason to fear that these prospective husbands will be only another mouth to feed. Continuing to have high levels of low-skilled immigration, legal or illegal, will only further harm African-American workers.”

It’s not just labor and protecting Black wages that makes Trump seem like more of a leftist than the party he’s running against. His opposition to foreign wars and U.S. support for them was a cornerstone of the post-war Left. Even his position on abortion—that it should be legal for 15 weeks with exceptions always for incest, rape, and the health of the mother—is closer to the Democrats’ position in the 1990s than the post-Roe Democratic consensus that no upper limit be imposed on the right to an abortion. Remember “safe, legal, and rare”? That was the Democrats’ position up until this century.

Trump is the candidate who believes in creating an economy that protects the wages and labor of American workers—who has a record to show that he can do it. He is the candidate most committed to protecting Black jobs and Black wages from the immense downward pressure of illegal immigration and free trade. And much as it is hard to see through the prism of the headlines inundating us on social media, he isn’t a divider so much as the person who united the working class of all races against the elites who have contempt for them.

Certainly, there is a rising tide of antisemitism coming from the fringes of the far Right, and I don’t want to downplay that. But when the enemies of the Jews make clear their views on the Right, they are marginalized from the mainstream, which is not something you can say about antisemitism on the Left.

Moreover, I think it’s easy enough to see that Trump’s commitment to peace in the Middle East, based on the record of the Abraham Accords, is something many Jews feel is in our interests. But that’s not the reason to vote for him. The reason to vote for him is that he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us as American Jews for centuries.

The Left didn’t just abandon us—it abandoned labor. That’s who we should go back to standing with, just as America’s working class has stood by us.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.