March 23, 2026
Trump did not win by showing restraint. He won by attacking a system that millions already believed was broken.
President Donald Trump attends a tour of Thermo Fisher Scientific facilities to tout his administration’s efforts to lower drug prices in Reading, Ohio, March 11, 2026.(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) There is a dangerous and increasingly dominant misinterpretation of Trump’s appeal within Democratic politics. Matthew Yglesiasa Harvard graduate and New York native, made a career as a working-class soothsayer to the elite. He tells corporate Democrats what working-class Americans think. And because that’s what they want to hear, they listen. His latest theory: The party is too woke, too ideologically rigid, and if candidates would just moderate on a handful of cultural issues, the working-class voters they lost would return. This seems reasonable. There are graphics. He cites experiences from academic surveys.
It also turns out to be false. And the people most affected by this misdiagnosis are precisely those that Yglesias and the “moderates” claim to be channeling.
Yglesias and the editors of The New York Times treat Donald Trump’s victories as proof that moderation works, emphasizing positions he has reversed on cuts to Medicare, the war in Iraq, opposition to open service for gay and lesbian soldiers. This reading fundamentally misunderstands what Trump did. He didn’t win by meeting us halfway on policy details. He won by going to war against the institutions we accused of being responsible for our decline. The two parties, the media, the donor class, the trade deals that destroyed manufacturing, the consensus that governed Washington for 30 years. None of this is moderation. This is a frontal attack on the status quo. What he quietly abandoned were the positions that most clearly indicated he was working for the same donor class as everyone else.
Moderators call this “angry centrism.” I would say it was a scam that worked because it addressed a real grievance.
The deeper problem is the narrowness of their imagination. They constantly talk about supermajorities and reconquering the center, but never look at what actually produced these supermajorities. Yglesias has writing that if AI advances in current time, “America is done”. This fatalism is revealing. This means that the moderation argument isn’t really about how to win. It’s about how to lose more slowly while preserving the existing economic architecture. Moderating affirmative action while accepting permanently unaffordable health care and housing as facts of nature is not a governing vision. This is a smaller version of the same failure that created this crisis in the first place.
THE Times presents Obama as a model of winning moderation. I can speak to this from personal experience. Al Gore was my first election. I was 20 years old. I didn’t vote again for eight years, until Obama ran. He didn’t just inspire me to vote. I went to Asheville to see him speak. I collected money for him from my family members. I hosted a watch party on election night. I was sincerely all in, because I believed he was ready to overthrow a system that had been crushing my region for decades, to rebuild a Democratic Party closer to that of FDR or LBJ than to that of Bill Clinton.
Current number
I didn’t vote again for seven years, until Bernie Sanders came along in 2015. And Bernie didn’t just inspire me to vote, either. I sold my business and started volunteering for the campaign until I got enough attention to get hired there.
In my life, I have voted four times: Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders twice. Each of these votes required someone to truly inspire me, to make me believe that they were willing to fight the system rather than manage it. I told this to Michelle Goldberg, a columnist at Timeswhen I was in New York recently, and she was mortified. I’m just mortified that I only voted four times. The question she didn’t ask was why. The question she didn’t ask was what it would take. The question she didn’t ask was what kind of candidate or party could make someone like me the person who sold his business and gave everything he had to a political campaign.
This is the voter about whom the moderating crowd has no theory. They have a theory of the compelling suburban moderate who needs to feel comfortable crossing the border. They have no theory about the tens of millions of us who have left the system entirely, who will move mountains for the right candidate and stay home for everyone else. We don’t expect a tougher Democrat on the border. We are waiting for someone who is ready to fight.
What caused the collapse, the wipeout of 2010 and everything that followed, was not Obama’s presence on the list. It was his moderation once in power. A month before the 2008 elections were even decided, a Citigroup executive had already emailed John Podesta an almost complete list of Obama’s future cabinet, and it came true almost entirely. The fact that a Citigroup executive can pre-screen a firm before a single vote is cast tells you everything about how the system filters candidates before they come to us. He adopted Romneycare instead of a public option. We’ve noticed it across Tennessee, West Virginia, and the Rust Belt. Not because he wasn’t tough enough on transgender issues. Because the help that was supposed to arrive never arrived.
THE Working Class Project39 focus groups, 400 voters, 21 states, found that we perceive Democrats as “too focused on social issues and not enough on economic issues that affect everyone, every day.” Yglesias reads this and concludes: less awake. Stop talking about trans people. Find a candidate who is more like a regular guy. This is exactly the wrong lesson.
What we are describing is not an excess of cultural liberalism. We describe a party that spent 30 years presiding over the destruction of our economic lives and filling the void with culture war positioning because it had nothing real to offer. The frustration has never been that Democrats care about gay marriage. That’s because gay marriage was the only thing they had the courage for. FDR could afford to be very progressive on social issues because he also electrified your farm and hired your neighbor. When structural ambition disappeared, all that remained was culture.
As a working-class white man from Appalachia, I know what drove me away from the Democratic Party, and it wasn’t wokeness. It was seeing a party that claimed to represent working people become indistinguishable, on the things that really mattered to my area, from the Republicans they were supposed to fight. The united party of war, free markets, and neoliberal consensus that shipped away our jobs, left our cities to rot, looked the other way while the Sacklers poisoned our communities, and then came back every four years to tell us that the market would eventually make things right.
The multiracial numbers bear this out. Working-class Latino men went from 22% supporting Trump in 2020 to 55 percent in 2024. Working-class black men increased from 17 percent to 22 percent. If this was a story about awakening that scares people away, you wouldn’t see these numbers. What you see is a class revolt against a party that has stopped fighting for us.
United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024$15,474 per person, about double the OECD average, and ranks last among rich countries in terms of results. One hundred and forty-six rural hospitals have closed since 2005. Yglesias’ answer is more subsidies, more safeguards, more money poured into the same failing private system. If this approach could have improved health care in the United States, $5.3 trillion a year would have already done so. Most of us believe that the government has a responsibility to guarantee health care. A wealth tax voted on 74 percent. There is no gap between us and bold policy. There is a gap between us and a political class unwilling to defend it.
Popular “Swipe left below to see more authors”Swipe →
If the Democratic Party absorbs Yglesias’s prescription and shifts to the right on culture while leaving the economic architecture of extraction intact, it will have done nothing to remedy the conditions that made Trump possible. It will have produced a more refined version of the same failure. And ultimately, it produces something worse than Trump: a better fascist. A more competent leader, able to articulate a true structural vision without the chaos and corruption. Someone who names the same enemies as Trump, but means it and has the discipline to follow through.
The Working Class Project asked us what we wanted. We were clear: “Democrats should not be afraid to recognize that we need big, bold, aggressive changes, at every level. » The study leaders heard: Be less awake. This gap – between what we say and what the political class is capable of understanding – is the entire problem in a single data point. Democratic leaders cannot deliver what is needed. Not because they lack a voice, but because they cannot see beyond the class interests and donor relationships that filter everything they hear. The current work does not convince them. He replaces them.
Support independent journalism that breaks the rules Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding popularity couldn’t have been clearer: rampant corruption and billions of dollars’ worth of personal enrichment during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided solely by his own abandoned sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Today, an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire across the region and Europe. A new “forever war” – with ever-increasing troop probability Americans on the ground – could very well be upon us.
As we have seen time and time again, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory justifications for attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are threatened by non-citizens registered to vote. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is the only one that can uncover the lies that threaten our republic – and civilians around the world – and shine a light on the truth.
The nation’s experienced team of writers, editors and fact-checkers understand the scale of what we face and the urgency with which we must act. That’s why we publish critical reporting and analysis on the war with Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
But this journalism is only possible with your support.
This month of March, The nation must raise $50,000 to ensure we have the resources to produce reports and analysis that set the record straight and empower people of conscience to organize. Will you donate today?
Corbin Trent Corbin Trent is an Appalachian factory owner turned political strategist, co-founder of Justice Democrats, and former communications director for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He writes about rebuilding America AmericasUndoing.com.
