Trumpers discover a type of bigotry they oppose (against themselves)
Vivek Ramaswamy gives MAGAs a taste of their own medicine.
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Donald Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet, and his leading supporters are already tearing at each other’s throats like a pack of frothing and foul-smelling Klansmen over whether there are any good immigrants.
“Take a big step back and F**K YOURSELF in the face,” Elon Musk tweeted Friday night in defense of immigrants who worked for him, in response to a Trump supporter with a more hardline view.
The spectacle of billionaire Musk, techbro Vivek Ramaswamy, would-be Goebbels Steve Bannon, and gibbering Islamophobe and Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer all screaming and bellowing at each other is entertaining in a morbid way. Acrimony is inevitable in a coalition held together by bile, hatred, and racism. And if Democrats can get their act together, they may well be able to take advantage of MAGA dissension.
At the same time, it’s important not to not over-interpret the intra-Trumper feud. Racism is a lie, which means it’s always incoherent — and racist coalitions often therefore end up fighting amongst themselves about who’s in the in group and who gets targeted by the regime.
But historically, these arguments at the margins have often coexisted with massive human rights abuses. Ramaswamy and Bannon may disagree about the exact trajectory of MAGA. But they can still come together to hurt a lot of people — and that is exactly what they will try to do.
For MAGA, all bigotry is not created equal
This week’s round of MAGA on MAGA violence was ignited by Loomer, who was most recently in the news for her oddly close relationship to Trump in the weeks following the Butler shooting.
On December 23, Loomer attacked Sriram Krishnan, who Trump selected as an advisor on artificial intelligence, criticizing his support for H-1B visas. H-1Bs allow highly skilled workers to come to the US to work and are especially prevalent in tech, where they’re used by many Indian and Chinese engineers. Loomer tweeted that support for H-1Bs was “not America First policy."
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Musk, CEO of twitter/X, Telsa, and SpaceX, has claimed to have worked in the US on an H1-B visa himself — though there is some dispute about that — and he pushed back hard against Loomer.
“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley," Musk tweeted on Christmas.
Then Ramaswamy — co-leader with Musk of Trump’s much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency — poured fuel on the fire. He tweeted that tech companies need to hire foreign workers because “our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence.” He went on to sneer that America “celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ” and suggested Americans who have trouble getting tech jobs are “wallowing in victimhood.”
In short, Ramaswamy smeared all Americans, including Trump-supporting white Americans, as lazy and mediocre — tropes usually associated with anti-Black racism. Loomer, for her part, told Musk he had only supported Trump to “protect your buddy Xi JinPing [sic].” Far right pundit Ann Coulter jumped in, arguing that Musk and Ramaswamy only wanted foreign workers because they have few labor protections and are effectively “indentured servants.” (That’s a point progressive critics have made as well.)
Musk responded by calling opponents of H-1Bs “contemptible fools” and “hateful, unrepentant racists.” He also appears to have demonetized the accounts of Loomer and other rightwing critics — prompting Bannon to call Musk a “toddler.”
Finally, Trump returned from the golf course on Saturday and made a policy statement. Though he’s harshly criticized the H-1B program in the past, he reversed himself and said “it’s a great program.” So Musk seems to have won for now, though who knows what Trump will say next week.
Racism is stupid
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the MAGA spat is the inevitable outcome of “Trump’s deep-seated and extreme transactionalism.” Indeed, Trump has few real policy commitments beyond self-aggrandizement and revenge.
Various people — Musk, Loomer, Bannon, RFK Jr., whoever — glommed onto Trump for fame or fortune or to advance their own agendas. Now they have to fight among themselves because Trump himself doesn’t really care enough to impose a vision, much less any kind of discipline.
That’s certainly part of the dynamic here. But it’s also important to note that the ideological divisions on display are in part the natural result of founding a movement on racism and bigotry.
Racism is as thoroughly debunked as any ideology can be. There is no consistent difference in intelligence or ability between different groups of humans; we’re all the same race. That means that “racial differences” are all made-up nonsense.
And that in turn means that two racists are likely to make up slightly different nonsense from each other. MAGA can hate all immigrants, but idolize Musk — or, if they hate Musk, they can idolize Melania. Ramaswamy can spew a bunch of racist tropes and apply them to Americans as a group rather than to other groups we’re more used to seeing get picked on.
There are always exceptions. People will draw the line in different places, because the underlying concept is horse pucky. Racists are like the monks arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (except more hateful).
It should be no surprise, then, that past racist regimes had similar debates about who to target and who to exempt. For instance, in 1933, when the Nazis issued legislation to exclude Jewish people from the civil service, President Hindenburg objected strongly. He declared that excluding “my old Front soldiers” who happened to be Jewish was “utter anathema to me.” He added, “if [Jewish soldiers] were worthy of being called up to fight and bleed for Germany, they ought also to be seen as worthy of remaining in their professions to serve the Fatherland.”
Hindenburg won that fight — Jewish veterans, including those with a father or son killed in action in World War I, were exempted from expulsion.
Hitler had a much more thoroughgoing investment in ideology than Trump, to put it mildly. But even he had to negotiate initially with members of his coalition. Hitler believed that all Jewish people were enemies of the state, but that notion didn’t jibe with Hindenburg’s lived experience. Racism was incoherent and unconvincing, which meant there was no real principled ground for absolute dictats. So someone with more power like Hindenburg could force Hitler to compromise.
You do not gotta hand it to Trump
The Nazi compromises helped a limited number of people for a limited period of time. Obviously, though, they did not prevent the Holocaust. In fact, scholar Claudia Koonz argues that Hitler’s accommodation of Hindenburg and other critics may have helped the Nazis consolidate power in the long run.
Many Germans, not to mention many international leaders and communities, were initially alienated and horrified by chaotic Nazi violence directed against Jews. In that context, legal restrictions on Jewish people, especially when those legal restrictions had supposedly humane carveouts, could look like the reimposition of law by a “reasonable” regime. Protecting Jewish veterans made Hitler look more moderate, just as protecting H-1B visas may make Trump look less extreme.
This dynamic isn’t inevitable. We don’t need to hand Trump a propaganda victory. We can continue to highlight his regime’s racism and cruelty. We can do everything we can to prevent him from carrying through on his horrific promises of mass deportation and sweeping human rights abuses.
But to oppose Trump effectively, we need to understand how authoritarian regimes have functioned in the past. Racist coalitions have internal disagreements, including about about who to target and how to target them. But these disagreements will not, in themselves, prevent the worst — even if watching the food fight is entertaining for a moment or two.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading, and happy holidays.
Exceptional column. Just one quibble. From what I have read, Musk was never here on an H-1B visa. He violated the student visa he was here on when he dropped out of school and started working without an H-1B (per Ron Filipowski and I think Seth Abrams). Also from the great Seth Abrams, a Musk biographer, "I can't find a single component of the man's biography that he hasn't lied ruthlessly about."
Sherrilyn Ifill points out that this Musk v. MAGA squabble misses the main point about real or perceived deficiencies in the U.S. workforce: they can be traced directly to the gutting of U.S. public education in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, especially but by no means only in the South. She also notes the SCOTUS 1974 decision in San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, upholding the use of property taxes to fund public education, because white flight to the suburbs left the burden on those least able to pay. Right-wing attacks on education continue apace, and right out in the open: witness the Project 2025 plan to abolish the Department of Education. And, as you note, racism is at the heart of this. Ifill's Substack is very worth reading: https://sherrilyn.substack.com/p/tell-vivek-the-call-is-coming-from.