.jpg?trim=0,50,0,50&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "‘MAGA leftist’ blames Obama for 2008 bank bailout that was signed by George W. Bush – UK Times")
Self-described “MAGA leftist” Batya Ungar-Sargon confidently declared on Thursday night that President Barack Obama’s “first act in office” was passing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that bailed out financial institutions during the height of the 2008 financial crisis.
Ungar-Sargon would double down on that claim the following morning, tweeting that “in 2008, President Obama bailed out Wall Street and screwed over Main Street” while defending Donald Trump’s tariffs, insisting that “in 2024” the current president “screwed over Wall Street to bail out Main Street.”
There is just one small problem with The Free Press columnist’s analysis: TARP was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008 — a full month before Obama was elected president and four months before he entered the White House.
During an appearance on CNN Newsnight with Abby Philip, Ungar-Sargon — who has been making the media rounds to passionately defend Trump’s chaotic tariffs that have sparked a global market meltdown — attempted to contrast the factors that led to the Great Recession to the current economic environment.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the 10 million Americans who lost their homes in the 2008 financial crisis, and how President Obama’s first act in office was to give $700 billion to the banks that caused it, including $30 billion in bonuses to the crooks who organized it,” she exclaimed.
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“And I’m thinking about how those very Americans saw a president pick Wall Street over Main Street,” Ungar-Sargon added. “And what they saw this whole week was a president willing to go out there and fight for the forgotten men and women of this heartland and take on the entire international global order for them.”
A one-time Marxist academic who has since morphed into a Steve Bannon-style MAGA populist-nationalist, Ungar-Sargon has pounded the drum in recent days that Trump is “waging war” for “the forgotten people in the heartland of America” with his trade war, going so far as to argue that it could fix the “crisis in masculinity.”
Still, regardless of the merits of her arguments on behalf of Trump’s tariffs, one thing is indisputable — TARP was not Obama’s “first act” after he was sworn in as president in 2009.
In reality, the massive bailout came about during the fall of 2008 when the global economy was in freefall due to financial institutions and banks — many of which were deemed “too big to fail” — going bankrupt due to the subprime mortgage crisis. With the housing bubble bursting and defaults skyrocketing, the mortgage-backed securities that lenders and investment firms bought up in high volumes became worthless, resulting in these institutions losing all their money — and customers’ deposits.
TARP was eventually implemented to buy up these “toxic” assets and keep the banks afloat amid concerns of a full-blown economic collapse. The bill was initially met with bipartisan resistance and even failed on its initial vote in the House, but Congress eventually passed it after some tweaks, and it was quickly signed into law by Bush.
After Obama came into office, other changes were made to the program, including prohibiting firms receiving TARP funds from giving bonuses to their 25 highest-paid employees. The Treasury Department reported in 2023 that the total amount disbursed from TARP was $443.5 billion, with the government collecting $425.5 billion through repayments, sales and dividends. “After considering the interest expense of $13.1 billion, the net cost of TARP programs was $31.1 billion,” the report stated.
Sharing a clip of her CNN comments, Ungar-Sargon reiterated that Obama was responsible for TARP while simultaneously claiming Trump was president last year.
“In 2008, President Obama bailed out Wall Street and screwed over Main Street,” she posted on X (formerly Twitter). “In 2024, President Trump screwed over Wall Street to bail out Main Street. That’s what a lot of Americans are going to remember about last week.” It didn’t take long for a number of political commentators and journalists to take Ungar-Sargon to task for her revisionist history.
“Bush was President in 2008. Trump’s tariffs are cratering the economy in 2025. I would recommend that @CNN and @abbydphillip stop inviting on pundits who don’t seem to have a handle on the most basic facts about politics or economics,” Pod Save America host Tommy Vietor reacted.
“How many mistakes can you make in one tweet?” Charles W. Cooke, a senior writer for the conservative outlet National Review, wondered while Inside Elections deputy editor Jacob Rubashkin was even more succinct with his observation of Ungar-Sargon’s remarks.
“‘Who was president in 2008?’ and ‘Who was president in 2020?’ are two questions you should be required to answer before you opine about politics on TV,” he noted.
“It’s one thing to go on TV and claim that Obama was president in 2008. TV is hectic and ppl make mistakes,” The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson added. “But it’s another thing to log on in the morning and go: To be clear, Obama, who became POTUS in 2009, hates the common man so much he traveled back thru time to sign TARP.”
