Welp! The GOP Is Learning It’s Hard to Be a Big Tent Party

It’s like the Avengers civil war except slightly—slightly!—more fascist, and a whole lot stupider.

By Kylie Cheung | December 30, 2024 | 1:54pm

Photo: Getty Images Politics

Welp! The GOP Is Learning It’s Hard to Be a Big Tent Party

Donald Trump isn’t in office yet, but the shitshow surrounding his incoming administration is in full swing. In case you caught glimpses of it, you might wonder how the MAGA Civil War broke out over the Christmas holiday—don’t these people have friends and families to spend time with??? Alas: No, not really! Much of the very public food fight was spearheaded by techno-fascist and serially divorced man Elon Musk, whose family was probably relieved he was too busy tweeting to try and spend time with them.

Let me back up: Famously, Trump ran and won on an agenda of hard-line xenophobia threatening mass deportations. But last week, a serious fissure formed between the Muskian wing of the MAGA movement and… almost everyone else. The culprit? H-1B visas, which allow foreign workers and students from “specialty occupations”—for example, the expansive, readily exploitable labor force of foreign tech workers who staff Musk’s companies—to legally live and work in the U.S. By Saturday, Trump weighed in, siding with the pro-H-1B faction—but not before allowing serious divisions to form within his party.

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Last week, Musk and his colleague at the made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Vivek Ramaswamy, came out hard in favor of H-1B visas. Ramaswamy got things started with a cartoonishly long tweet bashing American-born workers and American culture, broadly. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote, then seemingly called Americans lazy to justify the need for H-1B visas. The rest of the tweet was ridden with forced, media-illiterate references to a hodgepodge of classic American films and TV shows, like Boy Meets World, Saved by the Bell, and Family Matters. The TrueAnon podcast aptly summed up Ramaswamy’s clumsy points with their own tweet: “Vivek intervenes in the MAGA civil war by saying the reason tech companies need to bring H1-B visa employees over is because Americans failed to venerate Steve Urkel.”

Ramaswamy’s tweet drew an immediate onslaught of outrage from the MAGA world, including his nemesis Nikki Haley, who responded, “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture… We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

As Musk and Ramaswamy coalesced to prioritize their pro-H-1B business interests, after months of spewing aggressively anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric, MAGA icon and self-avowed white nationalist Laura Loomer came out swinging against them. She accused Musk of “cock blocking” all of Trump’s meetings and called it “wildly inappropriate how a guy with no experience in politics… is now staffing the Trump admin.” Ann Coulter, another far-right influencer who long ago turned on Trump for ostensibly becoming too liberal, argued tech billionaires like Musk only support the H-1B program because it makes foreign workers easier for them to exploit.

Musk then spent the weekend tweeting—agreeing with a tweet from one of his sycophants that called large swaths of the MAGA movement “retarded,” telling those who disagree with him to “fuck yourselves in the face,” and then doing a performative 180 on immigration, tweeting that immigrants of “any race, creed or nationality” who “worked like hell to contribute to this country will forever have my respect.”

Both sides have made half-baked, semi-decent points, though entirely for the wrong reasons—and all too late, of course, since they already elected Trump. Speaking of, amid all of this infighting, the 78-year-old who is about to be the oldest person to become president seemingly tried to text Musk on Friday—only to post the message on Truth Social instead: “Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago? We miss you and x!” he wrote, referring to Musk’s son X Æ A-Xii. “New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.” (Gentle reminder that the same hands that accidentally posted this text now control the nuclear codes.)

But I’m not invested in any of this for the purpose of identifying winners or losers—as far as I’m concerned, everyone involved in this humiliating tiff can, ahem, “fuck [themselves] in the face.” I’m invested in observing the varying factions and power dynamics that will likely define the Trump administration. Former Trump adviser and far-right influencer Steve Bannon vocally sided with Loomer, and his 2023 comments calling Musk a “globalist” so hungry for profit he’d “take a check from Adolf Hitler himself” are being recirculated. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), meanwhile, sided with Musk and Ramaswamy, in a continuation of her well-documented, highly petty, and highly personal beef with Loomer. Haley, you’ll recall, came out against Musk and Ramaswamy—and this, too, was likely personal, given her own beef with Ramaswamy from the 2024 GOP primary.

Dozens of other niche, terminally online right-wing stars took sides and dialed in, and a separate controversy took root when those who criticized Musk found themselves losing Twitter verification, while Musk openly admitted to shadow-banning some of them. This sequence of events was nothing if not ironic, considering Musk notoriously used his purchase of Twitter to amplify a staggering amount of far-right accounts and literal neo-Nazis—only for them to now turn on him for, in their opinion, not being racist enough toward predominantly Asian, non-citizen tech workers.

I can’t stress enough that there are no good guys here: Musk is an unrepentant bigot—that coexists with his unwavering commitment to whatever allows him to exploit the most people. Loomer, Coulter, and Bannon are all correct about Musk being terrible—and that is the only thing they’ve ever been right about.

Now that Trump’s expressed his support for H-1B visas, telling the New York Post, “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” this phase of the MAGA Civil War seems to be over. But Trump isn’t even in office yet. Really, this is just a sneak preview. And, as much as I wish I could find any satisfaction in the right-wing influencers who announced they now regret their Trump votes, it’s hard to find satisfaction with any political outcome given who’s about to be in the White House.

Good luck to all of us as the GOP learns the hard way that it is not easy to be a big tent party and inevitably makes it all of our problem.