The Weekly Sift

Fractures are already showing in the MAGA coalition,
and they haven’t even taken power yet.

---

When a party out of power suddenly finds itself on the verge of taking control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you’d expect to find them coasting on a wave of good feeling. Victory salves all wounds, so everybody should be ready to dance with everybody else at the inaugural balls.

Strangely, though, MAGAWorld is full of conflict these days. One Trump-supporting fascist (Steve Bannon) is calling another Trump-supporting fascist (Elon Musk) a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services. And American workers, says Vivek Ramaswamy, can’t compete with immigrants because they suffer from our “culture”, which venerates mediocrity over excellence.

But wait: Isn’t the whole point of Trumpism that “real” (i.e. White Christian) Americans are victims of the liberal Deep State that wants to “replace” them with brown-skinned Third Worlders? What’s going on?

First skirmish: Foreign investment. Trump owes his election to two groups whose interests don’t match up: White working class voters and ultra-rich technology barons like Elon Musk. During the campaign, Trump could keep his plans vague enough that both were satisfied, and many low-wage workers could imagine that the richest man in the world was their friend.

But now that the election is over, the question keeps coming up: Who’s the real president, Trump or Elon? At first I interpreted such comments as Democratic trolling, trying to stir up trouble in MAGAWorld by taking advantage of Trump’s ego. (I remember in his first term how similar questions about Mike Pence riled him. Speculation at the time was that Trump would bask in the glory of the presidency, leaving Pence to do the actual work of governing.)

But more and more, there seems to be something to the murmurs. The move to reject a compromise and risk a government shutdown last week started with Musk, and Trump eventually got on board. Musk was the leader and Trump the follower.

Support for the stopgap spending bill then collapsed, forcing [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and his leadership team to scramble to find an alternative path forward. As they did, Musk celebrated, proclaiming that “the voice of the people has triumphed”.

It may be more accurate, however, to say that it was Musk’s voice that triumphed.

In the end, Congress passed a continuing resolution that still included the most important extras Democrats wanted: rebuilding the Key Bridge in Baltimore and disaster relief. And it kept government spending at basically the levels set before Republicans took control of the House two years ago.

Trump did not get the extra he wanted: suspending or eliminating the debt limit. But Musk did get what he wanted: The original proposal included an “outbound investment” provision limiting how American companies could invest in China.

We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.

Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.

One corporation that would be affected by this is Musk’s Tesla.

Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.

Lo and behold: The outbound investment provision vanished from the final version of the continuing resolution. In other words, Republicans in Congress spent their negotiating chips getting what Musk wanted, not what Trump wanted.

Second skirmish: H-1B visas. A second conflict is still playing out: One of the most important issues for the MAGA base is immigration, and in particular protecting the jobs of American citizens from immigrant competition. “They’re taking American jobs” is one of the most effective attacks on immigrants at all levels, even the ones working jobs hardly any Americans want, like picking crops by hand or watching rich people’s kids for practically no pay.

However, American corporations have a different agenda: They want to hire the best people in the world and pay them as little as possible. This is not new. America has been draining the brains of the world at least since the 1930s, when Jews and other anti-fascists escaped from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We may sympathize with the American physicists who suddenly had to compete with the likes of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, or American actresses who lost roles to Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, but in retrospect it’s hard to feel bad about letting those people into our country.

Similarly today, the US tech industry employs foreign-born workers in jobs many Americans would undoubtedly like to have. The legal vehicle that allows this is the H-1B visa. Employers can sponsor foreign nationals with at least a bachelors degree to apply for H-1B visas that allow them to live and work in the US for three years, with a possible renewal to six years. Currently, 85,000 such visas can be issued each year. 84% of them go to people from India or China. Maybe a handful of those immigrants really are exceptional Einstein-like talents we’d be foolish to turn away, but probably not all 85,000 of them.

The employer has to affirm that the worker will be appropriately paid and that his or her (mostly his) employment won’t negatively impact similar American workers. In practice, though, these provisions are hard to monitor or enforce. Critics charge that H-1B workers are easily abused, because (if no other employers are waiting in the wings) the employer can expel a worker from the US just by withdrawing sponsorship. So H-1B workers can become cheap-but-highly-trained labor that corporations may prefer to American workers that the company doesn’t hold as much leverage over.

Obviously, the tech barons want to be free to import as many cheap engineers and programmers as they want, while Americans with comparable credentials want H-1B visas limited or eliminated. This conflict goes to the heart of what “America First” really means: Should we be strengthening Team America by bringing in talent wherever we can find it, or should we be defending the livelihoods of individual Americans? (An analogy to bring this home: Imagine you’re a young outfielder for the New York Mets, and that you’ve been struggling for playing time so you can prove yourself. How do you feel about the team signing Juan Soto? Your team is better, so your odds of going to the World Series have improved. But your individual prospects have taken a hit.) TPM:

The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.

This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.

Nativists like Laura Loomer (who not so long ago was rumored to be having an affair with Trump) found this appointment “deeply disturbing“. Musk and Ramaswamy replied by attacking American workers, with Musk approvingly retweeting a post that described American workers as “retarded”.

Then Musk was attacked back, and responded by taking away privileges on X from people who criticized him. (Remember when Elon was a “free speech absolutist“? It turns out that just applies to Nazis.)

I think Paul Krugman has put his finger on what’s at stake here:

Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.

What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.