MAGA Dust-Up
A preview of things to come, or not?
A number of journalists are writing today about a dust-up in MAGA world in the last 24 hours. Here is my rough understanding of it.
The tech bros in Trump’s orbit, Vivek Ramiswami and Elon Musk, want the US to hire more tech specialists from other countries, and to do so they are proposing the US increase the number of H1-B visas that are extended to professionals from other countries. These visas are meant to bring highly educated specialists into the US, in this case tech, to increase our competitiveness as a global power. Those whom Musk and Vivek want to bring in are primarily from Asia. There is a vocal faction in MAGA against this, and in the last 24 hours, that faction was very loud in tweets from Laura Loomer, Trump’s very right-wing confidant. Laura is a believer that America is only for Americans, and she got very angry and racist in her tweets. To retaliate, Musk took away her blue check on X, along with some other people in her right-wing orbit. Lots of angry social media drama.
Van Jones, CNN commentator, did a Substack video commentary on this. He explains it more fully than I do.
It is a battle between tech executives in Trump’s orbit and traditional MAGA. Heather Cox Richardson wrote about it this morning and reported that Laura Loomer wrote on X: “none of the tech executives who are meeting with Trump and getting appointed in his cabinet supported him in 2020 or during the 2024 primary. I feel like many of them are trying to get into Trump’s admin[istration] to enrich themselves and get contracts at [the] D[epartment] O[f] D[efense]. This is not America First Policy.”
Columnist David Brooks in the NY Times also weighed in. He took the long view, which I found very interesting. “This is not a discrete one-off dispute. This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy. We’re going to see this kind of dispute also when it comes to economic regulation, trade, technology policy, labor policy, housing policy and so on.”
Trump is not even in office yet. I’m sure you noticed.
Musk has the football and it running with it, but I have a feeling Trump will stop him; the question is how. He has already used Musk’s money and is counting on it to threaten the Republican legislature going forward (in threats to primary those who won’t vote as they demand). If Trump had not involved Musk and Vivek in his administration at all, if they had not convinced Trump to set up DOGE (the unoffical Government agency called Department of Government Efficiency), the party would simply be the MAGA reactionary/isolationist party it always was. Musk and Vivek talk about wanting the best for the US in terms of competition with foreign adversaries, but their actions are for their own enrichment and that of their friends in the tech world. They do not operate on principle.
One more drawing before I go!
I hope your Saturday is a good one. Thanks to those of you who joined the zoom last night, that was fun! We will do it again, and, at the request of one person and agreement from the others who were there, I will tape the next zoom for those who can’t come.
Thanks again for being here.
Well, that was inevitable. There will be more food fights and it will be interesting to see who wins. Meantime, purrs are better than bit coins. And a headbutt, well, that will get you salmon and warm cream.
Just a thought. What if to commemorate the January 6th 2021 attack on the Capitol, to be fair, what if a similar attack took place on Mar-A-Lago. Just a thought.