Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, there was a simmering tension in Republican politics about one of the party’s top priorities. At the top of the GOP ticket, Donald Trump condemned immigrants in unusually ugly terms — at times, literally echoing Adolf Hitler and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country — but beneath the surface, there was a conflict that went largely unaddressed.
Much of the Republican base took Trump’s rhetoric quite seriously and blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s ills. Some of the candidate’s top allies, however, especially from the private sector, saw nuances that would allow businesses to benefit from workers from abroad.
During a campaign, these tensions can be put aside. After a campaign, those tensions tend to bubble over.
It was against this backdrop that the president-elect announced early last week that venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan — a proponent of green cards for skilled workers — would work in Trump’s incoming administration, serving in a top artificial intelligence policy post. The news was not well received on the far-right.
A highly controversial MAGA activist named Laura Loomer — who spent at least part of the year as a member of Trump’s inner circle — condemned the decision to hire Krishnan, pointing to his support for the H-1B program, which provides temporary worker visas for high-skilled tech workers. An ugly back-and-forth, which some have labeled the “MAGA civil war,” erupted soon after.
On one side of the divide are prominent far-right voices such as Loomer and Steve Bannon, who have spent the last week clashing with figures such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They all remain Trump allies, of course, but they’ve also targeted each other in caustic and personal ways, culminating in the world’s wealthiest individual publishing a tweet in which he urged many of the president-elect’s supporters, “Take a big step back and f— yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Subtle, it was not.
After days of infighting among his allies, Trump decided to weigh in — or at least try to.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” the president-elect told The New York Post on Saturday. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
The comments were probably intended to resolve the conflict and address the schism as he prepares to begin his second term. As The New York Times noted, however, there was a rather glaring problem with Trump’s comments.
[H]is comments — which were enthusiastically embraced by the technology industry as an endorsement — may muddy the waters because Mr. Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States for up to three years and can be extended to six years. Instead, he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program, which is for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers.
Part of the problem with Trump’s comments was that he appeared confused about his own position. The Republican told the Post that he’s “a believer in H-1B,” which he considers “great.” That’s not true: As recently as 2020, Trump suspended H-1B visas, claiming that the program was hurting American workers. Indeed, during his 2016 candidacy, Trump called for ending the program altogether. But just as important is the fact that the president-elect is so unfamiliar with the details of immigration policy that he apparently got confused as to what H-1B visas even are. In other words, as his allies taunt and threaten each other, Trump can’t address the schism because he still doesn’t yet care enough about governing details and the substance of policymaking. What’s more, many of those around him know this, which will only encourage them to keep the fight going, confident in the knowledge that the president-elect is likely to agree with whomever speaks to him last. “This is war,” Bannon told the Times on Saturday. With this in mind, it’s a safe bet the so-called MAGA “civil war” isn’t likely to end anytime soon.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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