Letters from an American - December 30, 2024

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

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December 30th, 2024. The fight between MAGA and doggy continues. Original MAGAs who want the government to expel immigrants and elevate white evangelical Christian men are facing off against the new doggy MAGAs who disdain original MAGA culture and want the government to turn the tech billionaires loose from regulations and taxes to create their own global oligarchy. The fight has taken shape over H-1B visas that allow companies to hire foreign workers for skilled positions. MAGA opposes all immigration and relied on Trump's promise to deport 11 to 20 million immigrants. Doggie wants more H-1B visas,

arguing that America is not producing enough skilled engineers because of the misguided culture that Americans like MAGA's embrace. On Friday, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been very close to Trump since bankrolling his election, agreed with MAGA influencer Ian Miles Cheong, who has more than a million followers on X,

when Cheong posted, "'Much of the anger being driven toward Elon Musk today is simply disappointment being projected by the f***ing right that's on the fringes of the conservative movement against Musk whom they wish was an unrepentant racist like they are. Late on Friday night Musk defended H1B visas again posting on X the reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies

that made America strong is because of H-1B. He continued, 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. According to Forbes, Musk's Tesla was among the leading employers of those holding H-1B visas in 2024. Meanwhile, original MAGA influencer Steve Bannon used Musk's apparent throwing MAGA critics off X as a route to attack the entire doggy faction. They're trying to dump people off the platforms like that's gonna matter, he said to influencer Jack Posobiec.

You can't stop us. We're relentless. We're never going to quit. We're aiec, you can't stop us. We're relentless. We're never going to quit. We're a thousand times tougher than you guys are. Keep coming after American citizens like you're coming and you're going to find out exactly how tough we are. We're not going to tolerate this. You're trashing of the MAGA movement.

How dare you? I don't care how big a check you wrote. Today, Bannon doubled down. We're going to get H1B visas out, root and stem, and all the workers you brought in. Just like we're deporting 15 million here, we want them deported out and give those jobs to American citizens today.

We demand they get reparations. You stole from them. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out on Saturday that what many of us have been calling a civil war in the MAGA movement is not the best way to look at the MAGA fight. Marshall points out that the 2024 to 2025 MAGA was mostly just an electoral machine built around Trump.

In the past, he notes, Meghan never really had policies. Mostly it was a vehicle for Trump's grievance about the investigation into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, and after his first impeachment it became about retribution. But now, as Marshall notes, Trump is tired and on the way out, and he never really cared about policy anyway. He ran for president for the purpose of staying out of jail and he never really cared about policy anyway. He ran for president for the purpose of staying out of jail and lording it over his foes. What's going on now, Marshall says, is less a civil war than a battle over the steering wheel. Trump absorbed groups into his

coalition with the promise he would work for them, but their policies have always been contradictory. Now that it's time for their payoff, not everyone can be appeased. So will the Trump machine work for the maggots or the doggies? Or even the Robert F. Kennedy Make America Healthy Again, Maha faction, which, as Marshall says, was grafted onto the movement in the last months of the final stretch of the campaign for narrowly electoral reasons. Today, Nathaniel Weichsel of The Hill outlined how the Maha faction is itself bitterly divided over issues like drugs to treat obesity. Marshall concludes that, in any case, there's little sign Trump cares. He's already gotten what he wants. On Saturday, in an interview with the New York Post, President-elect Donald Trump threw

his MAGA supporters under the bus and sided with Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on H-1B visas. I've always liked the visas. I've always been in favor of the visas. That's why we have them, Trump said, referring to the H-1B visas that permit companies to hire foreign workers in skilled occupations. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I've been a believer in H-1B.

I've used it many times. It's a great program. Trump appeared to be confusing H-1B visas with H-2A and H-2B visas, which cover temporary agricultural workers and seasonal workers in tourism, hospitality, and landscaping. In fact, as Leah McElrath pointed out, Trump said in 2016 that the H1B program shouldn't exist. And as Judd Legum pointed out, on June 22, 2020, Trump issued an executive order suspending H-1B visas because he said they were taking jobs from Americans.

The fight within MAGA is only part of the larger fight within the Republican Party, whose leadership needs to organize the newly elected members of the House of Representatives as soon as they get back to Washington, D.C. and come into session on Friday, January 3rd. The House should have a speaker in place before Congress counts electoral votes on January 6th. Even if Trump no longer needs MAGA voters, extremist MAGAs in the House do, and they're angry at current House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, for his willingness to work with less extreme Republicans and Democrats to keep the government operating. Members of the far right want to shut it down until it stops spending

more money than it takes in and stops supporting policies they oppose. This is turning into a fight over the House speaker. Extreme mega Republicans say they will not support Johnson for Speaker this time around, putting his election in jeopardy because the party's majority is so thin that Johnson cannot lose more than two votes. Trump was angry at Johnson for passing a continuing resolution to fund the government without getting rid of the debt ceiling, but perhaps looking at the tight congressional schedule endorsed him today with a social media post.

The Republican factions made the Congress that is just ending one of the least productive in history, and that chaos seems likely to get worse. With the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act, Congress suspended the US debt ceiling until January 1st, 2025, this Wednesday. The debt ceiling establishes a limit to how much the Treasury can borrow to fulfill the country's financial obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military

salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained. Last Friday, December 27th, Yellen warned Congress that the country will likely hit the debt ceiling between January 14th and January 23rd. The Treasury can resort to extraordinary measures to pay obligations, but if it is to keep the country functioning, the incoming Congress must raise the debt ceiling. That will not be easy. Trump wants to cut taxes for billionaires and corporations, a plan that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. After years of complaining about Democratic spending on social welfare programs, he is

now demanding that Congress get rid of the debt ceiling altogether. Republican lawmakers have said they will raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, but only in exchange for $2. trillion dollars in cuts to mandatory spending over 10 years. This would require cuts to popular programs, putting the Republicans in the position of cutting benefits to poor and middle-class Americans in order to give tax cuts to the rich. The party has gone a long way from the 1860s when party members invented the

income tax to guarantee both that the nation's bills got paid and that the burden would fall not upon each man an equal amount, as Representative Justin Smith Morrill, a Republican of Vermont, put it then, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay. There is also an international dimension of the fight for control of the US government. Musk followed up on last week's ex-post supporting the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany or AFD

criticized as a neo-Nazi group. On Saturday in Welt am Sonntag, Musk wrote that AfD is the last spark of hope for Germany. He claimed the right to speak about Europe's largest economy because of his significant investments in the country. The editor of the newspaper's opinion section resigned in protest. Conservative lawyer George Conway posted, So, the world's richest man, who grew up under apartheid in South Africa, and now pulls the mentally deteriorating incoming US president strings,

has written an op-ed urging Germans to elect a neo-Nazi government. Got that? He added, concerning. Yet Spahn, former State Secretary of the German Ministry of Finance and member of the German Bundestag, Germany's top federal legislative body, saw an even bigger picture. He's on the political right himself, but pointed out that AFD wants Germany to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, and is anti-US and pro-Putin and pro-Russia. Is that what the USA wants? Spahn asked. A Germany that turns toward Russia and away from the USA? German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called Musk's interference

with the German elections, whether it's hidden or open, as on X, a threat to democracy. Over the weekend, Trump's team appeared to be backing Trump's threats against Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark. Those threats seem deliberately designed to destroy NATO. Denmark is a US ally and a member of NATO. The US already has a military base there, the Patufik Space Base, as part of a mutual defense agreement between the US and

Denmark. If the US is concerned about foreign threats to Greenland, it does not have to take over the island. It could simply work with Denmark to increase the US presence there. But Trump's former national security adviser, Robert C. O'Brien, posted yesterday on X that Trump is 100% right to demand the

U.S. take possession of Greenland. We love the Danes, but a couple of additional drones, dog sled teams, and inspection ships are not enough to defend Greenland against the Russians and Chinese communists. Greenland needs anti-aircraft, counter-UAV drone, and anti-ship missile systems. It also requires at least one frigate on full-time patrol and a squadron of fighters. If our great ally Denmark can't commit to defending the island, the U.S. will have to step in, as POTUS 47 said. CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Schuto answered, to be clear, are you saying the Trump administration will deploy US

forces on the territory of a NATO ally without that allies consent? Former representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican of Illinois, was more direct in his response to O'Brien. He posted, when did you become insane? When viewed next to the statements of Russian pundits that a few powerful leaders should divide the world according to spheres of influence, there is perhaps logic to Trump's demands. Trump is not threatening our rivals,

but rather is threatening our own allies in the area around the U.S. And now Musk is supporting an anti-NATO, pro-Russia party in Germany. It could be that what we are seeing is an attempt to throw away NATO and America's influence across the globe in order to carve up the world into spheres, with Trump offering to abandon Europe to Russia while the U.S., run by the doggie faction of the Republican Party, officially takes control of a U.S.-centric sphere. Meanwhile, the Biden administration today stood firm on maintaining the position the

United States has held since World War II. President Biden announced nearly $2.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine as the Ukrainian people continue to defend their independence and freedom from Russian aggression. In addition, Treasury Secretary Yellen announced $3.4 billion in economic assistance to enable Ukraine to pay its health care workers, teachers, and first responders. At my direction, the United States will continue to work relentlessly to strengthen Ukraine's position in this war over the remainder of my time in office, Biden said.