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As you may have heard, all is not rosy in Trump land. The current trouble traces to Trump’s announcement last week that he would be appointing venture capitalist Srinam Krishnan as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence. The announcement exposed a fissure in the Trump coalition that, in a matter of days, erupted into open warfare between Elon Musk (supported by Trump) on one side of the divide and Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, and the MAGA base on the other.
The conflagration, centered in the nasty war of words between Musk and MAGA activist Loomer, has been well reported. I want to use this substack entry to draw some additional conclusions that the episode suggests about Trump 2.0.
First, a brief review of the bidding. Things started to go sour last Sunday, December 22, when Trump made his announcement about Krishnan, a prominent Silicon Valley figure who has worked at several major tech companies, including Snapchat and Clubhouse, and has been a close advisor to Musk. Krishnan is also—gasp!—an immigrant born in India, and now a naturalized U.S. citizen. He came to this country in 2007 on an L-1 visa (for intra-company transfer) to work at Microsoft. He has been vocal about his enthusiasm for the H-1B visa, an immigration channel that permits U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialized fields like technology and bring them to the states.
Trump’s announcement drew immediate fire from the core MAGA forces, including MAGA stalwart Laura Loomer, who saw it as a betrayal of the anti-immigrant, nativist stand that was the backbone of Trump’s candidacy.
Loomer called the designation “deeply disturbing” on social media posts. She wrote, “[o]ur country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India.” She went on to say, “It's not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H-1B visas. Not an extension.” She also questioned Krishnan’s bonafides as a Trump supporter.
Steve Bannon weighed in on her side, saying that the H-1B program “is a total and complete scam.” He also took to social media to argue that Musk was showing his “true colors” with his stance on the H-1B visa program and demand that the program be “zeroed-out.”
The latest entry in the nasty back-and-forth was a jaw-dropping diatribe on X by Musk, who wrote (all caps in original):
“The reason I’m in America along w/ so many… is b/c of H1B
Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
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So the battle is more than joined, and for now at least Trump has cast his lot with Musk. He tweeted most recently that he “always” has supported H-1B visas. (That’s a lie—he suspended H-1B visas during his first term.)
This bitter dustup holds several lessons about the chaotic and corrosive challenges that await us in just a few weeks.
1. The first point about the schism between Musk and the MAGA faithful is that there’s nothing accidental about it. This latent divide has always been present in the Trump coalition. Trump brought together billionaires and other economic elites with economic stragglers, predominantly non-college-educated whites and especially white males. The interests of those cohorts are fundamentally opposed, but the differences were papered over by shared antipathy for the coastal cultural elites that served as objects of enmity for both groups.
The strategic and fundamentally artificial amalgam is in fact a familiar trope of authoritarianism. Strongman leaders from Stalin to Orbán employ the same strategy of persuading—actually, hoodwinking—economic have-nots into blaming their fortunes on scapegoats denigrated as “outsiders” to the base. Trump rode to victory by vilifying immigrants and cultural elites for their supposed obsession with rights of various racial and social minorities, and constantly telling his base that those “others” were the source of their economic displacement.
The MAGA credo, echoing Loomer, is that white Europeans are the true Americans and non-whites, even highly educated, successful ones, are the “others” who take their jobs and cause their economic hardship. The way in which Trump rhetorically whips up these sentiments is a blunt play to the worst angels of our nature.
As for Trump’s billionaire patrons, they have been only too happy to go along with the demagoguery, betting that it would win Trump the election and result in policies that favor their interests, predominantly deregulation and corporate tax cuts. That again is a structural feature of the classic authoritarian strongman governing strategy.
Despite Trump’s reliance on Musk and other billionaire patrons, don’t look for him to make a complete turn to traditional business-oriented economic. A great looming tragedy of Trump 2.0 is that will continue to play to his nativist MAGA base with horrendous policies driven by long-repeated lies. Most notably, he will drive the promiscuous lie about thousands of illegal immigrants flooding the southern border to necessitate what he has called “the largest mass deportation program in the history of America.”Just yesterday, his immigration adviser and future deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller sent a letter warning state and local leaders that they could face criminal charges if they impede the effort.
Likewise, Trump’s promise of retributive prosecutions under the whip hands of Kash Patel in the FBI and Pam Bondi in the Department of Justice is a constitutional tragedy in the making. It too is based on a flagrant series of lies, in brief, that the prosecutions of Trump and his circle were based on politics rather than law. It too will be a stain on the country, a rank injustice to the targeted people, and a degradation of constitutional rule from which we may or may not be able to recover.
2. The second broad lesson to draw from the vicious infighting in Trump land is that it is a harbinger of similar battles to come. Trump’s coalition stayed united in the campaign out of a shared mission to beat Harris and the Democrats. Now that it’s time to actually govern, Trump will not be able to fully satisfy both disparate forces. And this is not the last time that he will put in with the billionaires. A businessman with a long string of failures who has always been the object of snickers from his peers, Trump cares about what the billionaires think certainly more than the base whom he exploited.
Yet the hardcore faction of the MAGA base is an obstreperous lot that won’t be satisfied with lip service. Figures such as Bannon, with their instinctual loathing of the new class of largely tech-created American tycoons, will be there to fan the flames.
We saw a series of governance debacles in Trump 1.0, particularly when the adults were not in the room and various contingents of Team Crazy took the reins (or just deferred to Trump’s own caprices, of the “bleach will cure Covid” variety). Now, Trump’s primary lesson from the first term as an imperative to seed the highest reaches of government based on the sole criterion of loyalty to him. That doesn’t simply eliminate the majority of potential candidates in a Republican administration; it excludes most of the people with experience, sobriety, and judgment.
There is a very long list of relatively respected officials from the first term who have spoken out against Trump, warning, from experience, of the consequences of his ignorance and self-centeredness. It is full of well-respected names like Mattis, Bolton, Tillerson, Kelly, Barr, Nielsen, Grisham, and many more. And Trump has taken exactly the wrong lesson from their warnings. Rather than exhibiting any humility in the face of scathing criticism by people who actually know something about government, he’s decided to exile and disparage them as “losers”. (Although, the ones in question probably wouldn’t return to a Trump White House in any event.) That approach is inevitably going to raise the already high Keystone-cops quotient of the coming administration.
3. Third, the dispute serves to expose the basic self-defeating shortsightedness of the MAGA anti-immigrant platform. Trump and Musk defend the H-1B visas, sensibly, as a means of attracting the best and brightest to our shores. And H-1B visa holders have in fact made integral contributions to scores of American successes. Trump and Musk want to distinguish between the highly educated H-1B visa holders—Musk’s confreres--and the lumpen, grimy figures who come to the United States seeking refuge and an economic new start.
But this nativist stance overlooks that it is both of these groups together that fuel American prosperity. There are countless underprivileged immigrants who come to this country and undertake necessary work in critical industries, like restaurants and farming, and whose children, who are guaranteed public education by the landmark Supreme Court decision in Plyer v. Doe, go on to college and graduate school and take their places among the haute. And multiple studies have shown that immigrants on a whole are far less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens.
That’s not the story of all immigrants, of course. But the other side of the coin applies also to the highly skilled immigrants whom Trump and Musk champion. There are plenty of people who came here on H-1B visas and proceeded to commit serious crimes. People like Rajat Gupta, former managing director of McKinsey, who was convicted of insider trading; or the Canadian Wyly brothers, convicted of securities fraud; or, hitting closest to home, Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian-born businessmen directly involved in the scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment, who was sentenced to two years for violating federal campaign finance laws. And on the other side of the divide
4. Finally, I turn to the uber-strange😊 figure of Elon Musk, who to all appearances starts the administration as the closest thing to a co-equal with the President. With Trump’s inveterate disloyalty, jealousy, and fickleness, where Musk will end the administration is a wide-open question.
Let's start with his stunning “FUCK YOURSELF in the face” tweet. This is the richest man in the world, a visionary who has started a series of breakthrough companies. But they’re the words of a social moron. And like Trump, they smash to smithereens the everything–I–need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten sense of basic courtesy and self-comportment. Is this the management style that fueled his spectacular success? And why would people want to work for such a loose cannon? No less an arbiter of maturity than Steve Bannon called out Musk as a “toddler” in response.
In fact, though Musk has been throwing around profanity on Twitter for many years, this tweet reads as if he’s a nine-year-old emulating his 12-year-old brother, Donald Trump, trying to act cool but completely missing that big brother is a widely reviled royal jerk.
And what about that infantile flourish that he must’ve been so proud of, not just “fuck yourself” but fuck yourself “in the face.” You can almost hear the ooohs of the 4th grade playground crowd and little Elon looking around for high fives. (And forgive my pedantry, but while I’m at it can I please point out that the phrase “this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend” is atrocious writing? The likes of issues??)
Finally, Musk’s claim that the H-1B visa is “the reason I’m in America” contradicts widespread reports that Musk came to the country from Canada on a student visa, which he proceeded to violate immediately by dropping out of school and going to work.
It’s evident that Musk is going to remain a lightning rod for controversy during Trump 2.0. The perch that Trump has bestowed on him, the co-leader of the newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, seems set up to, at best, not accomplish much of anything. And the two-person structure with Vivek Ramaswamy is a recipe for an intractability. I will be writing more about DOGE in a future substack.
During the campaign, with Musk capering about on stage and lending his credibility as an inventor and businessman, Trump needed Musk more than Musk needed Trump. But now it’s the reverse: with Trump soon to occupy the Oval Office, Musk needs Trump more than Trump needs him. Figures like Bannon will continue to seek his head. And Trump may deeply resent his growing profile. It may well be that he becomes a Navalny-like figure of Trump's authoritative rule, along with other past allies whom Trump may find it convenient to decapitate. (Not literally to suffer Navalny’s fate, but still to find himself out in the cold.)
Finally, if this no-holds-barred infighting can occur over immigration, Trump’s signature issue to which he always returns when finding himself off-balance, it’s even more probable to occur over issues where Trump’s plans are unformed and unclear. Such discord will create ample opportunity for power struggle among his advisors. The country is in for a series of rude surprises as Trump takes the reins and stumbles from stem to stern guided by little more than his mean-spirited small-minded instincts. With January 20 accelerating towards us, American democracy needs to brace itself to get fucked…in the face.
Talk to you later.
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