WASHINGTON – With President-elect Donald Trump’s allies in open warfare ahead of his inauguration, analysts see the latest hostilities between his billionaire backers and working-class base as a preview of tensions that threaten to shatter his fragile coalition.
The furore over whether to welcome skilled foreign workers has exposed deep fault lines between the hardcore immigration hawks who have been with Trump from the start and the “tech bros” who spent a fortune getting the Republican re-elected.
Threatening to grow into an irreparable schism, the row has prompted leading lights in Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) crusade to highlight what they see as the absurdity of a supposedly populist movement where the mega-rich call the shots. “I think this most recent war of words between traditional MAGA and big-tech MAGA was an opening salvo in a long-running battle over the future of the MAGA movement,” political analyst Flavio Hickel told AFP.
Leading the Silicon Valley faction is billionaire Elon Musk, the South African-born SpaceX and Tesla boss, who shelled out at least US$250 million (S$342.7 million) to bankroll the Trump campaign, even as the candidate pushed scare stories about a migrant-led crime wave that never was.
Mr. Musk’s money was a boon, but the world’s richest man found himself a target of MAGA after supporting visas for skilled foreigners, apparently unaware that his new allies’ anti-immigrant animus extends to his own employment practices.
‘Oligarchs v Nativists’
Assistant Professor Hickel characterized Mr. Musk, Mr. Vivek Ramaswamy, and several other tech tycoons that Trump has tapped in advisory roles as “ideologically libertarian” and favoring traditional conservative priorities like balanced budgets and expansive legal immigration.
“Traditional MAGA seems to care little about the budget and found Trump’s nativism to be the most appealing feature of his candidacies,” Prof. Hickel, who teaches politics at Maryland liberal arts school Washington College, said. In MAGA’s first internal conflagration since November’s election – dubbed “Oligarchs v Nativists” by the US media – Mr. Musk called his critics among the Trumpist base “contemptible fools” who should be rooted out.
Mr. Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist and MAGA media star, retaliated with a threat on his War Room podcast to “rip (Musk’s) face off” on New Year’s Eve, warning the tycoon not to “go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people.” Echoing concerns that Trump’s billionaire supporters have never really understood his appeal to blue-collar voters, Mr. Bannon told Mr. Musk and other “recent converts” to “sit back and study” MAGA’s stance on keeping US jobs for Americans.
Mr. Bannon and others have demanded “reparations” from Silicon Valley for cutting Americans out of jobs. The MAGA rabble-rouser said the visa issue is “central to the way they gutted the middle class in this country.”