Whiffed Attempt to Claim Moderate Mantle for Trump
Whiffed Attempt to Claim Moderate Mantle for Trump
No, his views are not those held by liberal Democrats in the 1990s.
THE WRITER AND EDITOR Batya Ungar-Sargon has lately been offering up some truly bizarre takes. A progressive turned left-populist who treats Donald Trump as a hero of the working-class revolt against the elites, Ungar-Sargon asserted last week that “Biden stands with Ukraine and Trump stands with Israel” because Trump likes strong allies and Biden likes weak ones. She has rightly been derided for this remark, which is mistaken in about four different ways.
But Ungar-Sargon1 made an even stranger claim during a March 1 appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time. Donald Trump, far from being an “extremist,” she declared, appeals to his supporters by being a “liberal”—“to Trump supporters, he is a liberal,” she says—and an heir to the mantle of 1990s Democrats:
This argument is worth examining because it gets at an important aspect of electoral trends—and because it might at first glance seem plausible. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton famously tacked to the political center on certain issues. And we all know that since the 1990s Democratic voters have moved substantially to the left on several issues, including immigration and abortion. In 1994, nearly two-thirds of Democrats agreed with the statement that “immigrants are a burden on our country because they take jobs, housing and health care”; by 2019, only 11 percent of Democrats agreed with it. Meanwhile, the percentage of Democrats who described themselves as pro-life dropped from a high of about 42 percent in 1998 to just 15 percent in 2023.
Still, no matter how you slice the data, there is simply no framework in which Trump’s views on immigration or abortion match those of 1990s Democrats. Let’s dig into the details.
To start, let’s look at the example Ungar-Sargon cites of Trump’s tentative support for a national abortion ban after sixteen weeks of pregnancy as an example of moderation. Even setting aside the fact that Trump’s proposal would presumably leave room for states to impose far more stringent abortion bans, there is also the fact that Trump touts the undoing of Roe v. Wade as one of his signature achievements. Democrats in the 1990s, by contrast, were committed to the preservation of Roe. The 1992 Democratic platform stated:
Democrats stand behind the right of every woman to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, regardless of ability to pay, and support a national law to protect that right.
It is a fundamental constitutional liberty that individual Americans—not government—can best take responsibility for making the most difficult and intensely personal decisions regarding reproduction. The goal of our nation must be to make abortion less necessary, not more difficult or more dangerous.
And immigration? Here’s the 1992 Democratic platform’s statement on the issue:
Our nation of immigrants has been invigorated repeatedly as new people, ideas and ways of life have become part of the American tapestry. Democrats support immigration policies that promote fairness, non-discrimination and family reunification, and that reflect our constitutional freedoms of speech, association and travel.
The 1992 Republican platform, by contrast, deplored illegal immigration as a threat to “the social compact” and called for stronger border control and penalties for smugglers and traffickers in fake documents (though its statements that “the Nation accepts immigrants and is enriched by their determination and values” and “we are stronger for our diversity” would probably elicit howls about “wokism” in today’s MAGAfied GOP).
Do Trump’s views today match those of Bill Clinton from the 1990s? Clinton, in keeping with his “triangulation” strategy of appropriating the other side’s winning issues, struck his own tough stance on illegal immigration, in the firm conviction that being too soft on immigration was a liability for Democrats. In his first term, he moved to enact reforms that would strengthen border control and facilitate the deportation of criminal aliens—albeit coupled with some immigrant-friendly initiatives that made it easier to seek asylum and obtain U.S. citizenship. The 1996 Democratic platform touted Clinton’s record on immigration enforcement, pointedly contrasting it to his Republican predecessors’ tough talk and lack of action.
Yet that platform also pointedly included a warning against using the issue of illegal immigration as a pretext for divisiveness and discrimination and deplored “the mean-spirited and short-sighted effort of Republicans in Congress to bar the children of illegal immigrants from schools.” (If you really want to feel like you’ve fallen through the rabbit hole into bizarroworld, check out the Democratic platform’s praise for “the wisdom of Republicans like Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani” who were opposing such efforts.)
The 1990s saw conflicted attitudes on immigration in the Democratic party, but it was among Republicans that you could see the rise of a punitive mindset that presaged Trumpism and its embrace of deliberate cruelty toward illegal migrants. In California, Proposition 187, passed by referendum in 1994, denied illegal immigrants and their children all social services including health care and schooling. (Despite a bipartisan immigration-skeptical consensus at the time, it was overwhelmingly a Republican initiative: 78 percent of Republicans who voted on the proposition backed it while 64 percent of Democrats voted against it. It was eventually killed by legal challenges which an incoming Democratic administration declined to contest.)
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, signed into law by Clinton but spearheaded and overwhelmingly supported by congressional Republicans, addressed some real problems but also reflected that same punitive mindset. Many of the bill’s provisions have been criticized as cruel and counterproductive, making it virtually impossible for illegal migrants to legalize their status even if they are married to U.S. citizens and have American children, and harshly penalizing even minor immigration and travel rule infractions (e.g., visa overstays) with lengthy bans on reentry. A particularly controversial section expanded the category of deportable criminal aliens so broadly that people brought to United States as children, raised as Americans, and often unaware that they weren’t U.S. citizens have been deported to “home countries” where they had never been before, over minor nonviolent offenses.
It’s true that Bill Clinton, the Democratic president, and many congressional Democrats supported these hardline policies. (Some 44 percent of House Democrats voted for the 1996 immigration reform bill, compared to 80 percent of House Republicans.) But that still doesn’t make Trump a “1990s Democrat.” Democrats who stressed their tough stance against illegal immigration in the 1990s were careful to balance this with praise for immigrants’ contribution to American society and warnings against attempts to blame immigrants for American problems (as well as practical steps to mitigate some of the harsh effects of hardline immigration laws). Even illegal immigrants were typically cast as victims of exploitation by unscrupulous smugglers and stingy employers, not as nefarious interlopers or “invaders.” Can you imagine Clinton declaring that the vast majority of Mexican immigrants to the United States are drug dealers, criminals and rapists? Or calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Or deriding immigrants who speak weird foreign languages? Or claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”? Neither can I.
In 2000, both the Democratic and the Republican platforms advocated strong measures to curb illegal immigration while also emphasizing a welcoming stance toward immigrants. Notably, both platforms spoke positively of family reunification, which Trumpian rhetoric dehumanizes as “chain migration.”
GIVEN THAT SURVEYS IN THE 1990s showed a split in both parties with college graduates and financially secure people being more pro-immigration than the non-college-grad and financially struggling respondents, one can see some basis for Ungar-Sargon’s “elites vs. the working class” framework. But it is no less true that in the 2000s, just as the culture began to shift toward more pro-immigrant and pro-immigration views, large segments of the right began to slide into increasingly unhinged anti-immigrant hysteria. (The 2002 book Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores by Michelle Malkin, these days an unabashed cheerleader for white supremacists, was an early warning call.)
Beyond immigration and abortion, Ungar-Sargon mentioned other issues on which Trump’s position supposedly matches that of 1990s Democrats—including trade and gay marriage. If you were to dig into the details of those issues as well, you would see her claim crumble. (It’s not clear what she even means with regard to same-sex marriage, since Democratic lawmakers and a majority of Democratic voters generally opposed it in the 1990s, while Trump, whose first run for the White House came in the wake of seismic cultural and legal shifts on the issue, has claimed to be “fine” with it as settled law.)
There’s no question that Trump has managed to harness the disaffection of many Democrats, as well as Republicans, who felt left behind for both cultural and economic reasons by shifts toward social liberalism. It’s a mutual feedback loop in which Trump’s odiousness pushes mainstream culture further to the left, including on immigration. One could have a serious discussion about this phenomenon and argue that Democrats should rediscover the balancing act between progressivism and prudential conservatism that made them successful in the 1990s—a role, by the way, that Joe Biden is arguably performing pretty well, given the very different climate of the 2020s. Or one could claim that Trump is Bill Clinton redux and that it’s some weird liberal quirk to see him as an extremist. Saying that with a straight face, though, must take a lot of effort.
Disclosure: I wrote regularly for Ungar-Sargon in the mid-to-late 2010s when she was opinion editor at the Forward and a couple of times after she became deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.