Today, Explained - MAGA meltdown

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

MAGA is fighting over immigration. Vox’s Andrew Prokop tells us what happened, and the Wall Street Journal’s Tim Higgins explains why it isn’t the first time Elon Musk has split the party — and won’t be the last. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Co-Chair of the new Department of Government Efficiency, arrives on Capitol Hill. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like any winning political coalition, MAGA united a lot of factions. The nativists, the populists, the VCs, some CEOs, some podcast bros. A far-right authorization on the U.N. ultra-nolotid, ultra-nolotid, oh my god, ultra-nolotid. MAGA is what they have in common. The rest is a crapshoot, and recently fissures emerged after President-elect Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan to be his senior policy advisor on AI. Mr. Krishnan is an immigrant from India. What followed was racism.

And what followed that was a real fight that pits MAGA's anti-immigrant wing against tech employers like Elon Musk, who make liberal use of visas for their foreign workers, and Tiger Dad Vivek Ramaswamy, who wants you home no later than six. What all this portends for MAGA. Coming up next. Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. No matter who you are or where you're going, Delta believes that you deserve to fly in the utmost comfort and style. It's about more than just getting you from point A to point B.

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Out Procrastination, putting it off, kicking the can down the road. In Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out Carpet in the bathroom, like why? In Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Vox, senior politics correspondent, Andrew Prokop. Andrew, the girls are fighting over the H-1B visa.

What is it? This is a program that lets companies bring skilled foreign workers to the US to work in specific jobs. And it's heavily used in Silicon Valley and the tech economy to bring in specific jobs. And it's heavily used in Silicon Valley and the tech economy to bring in engineers. These tend to be pretty highly paid or reasonably paid workers. The median salary for an H1B recipient

is about $125,000. And there's long been an argument over this with the immigration skeptical and populist faction of the right and also parts of the left saying that this is a program that's in effect hurting American workers by bringing in more foreign workers to compete with them to hold their wages down, et cetera. Okay, so that fight has been going on for a couple of years now. What happened to start the latest iteration of it?

You know, this is an issue where Trump himself has conflicting impulses, and he said various things over the years. If you go back to 2016, Trump was going back and forth between saying two things. The first was, We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can't do it, we'll get them in. The second is,

Right now, widespread abuse in our immigration system is allowing American workers of all backgrounds to be replaced by workers brought in from other countries to fill the same job for sometimes less pay. This will stop. You know, it's split the Republican Party for a long time with the pro business faction of the party being more pro H1B visa generally, and the kind of populist and nativist faction being against it. Now an interesting development happened when Trump scored these big endorsements from

major figures in the tech world about the summer of 2024. Mm, we did a show on that. Yes, yes. So Elon Musk, obviously, everyone knows him, but there's also David Sachs, who worked with Musk at PayPal and in the Twitter takeover. So Trump goes on David Sachs's podcast, a podcast he hosts with other venture capitalists called the All In Podcast over the summer. One of the hosts asks Trump,

can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America? I do promise, but I happen to agree. That's why I promise otherwise I wouldn't promise. Let me just tell you that fast forward to Trump wins the election. He appoints Elon Musk to head this new whatever you call it Department of Government Efficiency. So outside advisory board, we don't even know whether it will have any power or what

the heck will be going on with it. But big, you know, flashy job for Elon Musk. Also a big flashy job for David Sacks. He gets named the White House AI Tsar. So big role in charge of AI policy. So Trump has been announcing other new appointees. On December 22nd, he announces that he is appointing as a White House AI advisor, another venture capitalist, a friend of Sachs named Sriram Krishnan. That is when Laura Loomer enters the story. Laura Loomer is just this far right provocateur,

Laura Loomer is just this far right provocateur. Provocateur, you know, says all sorts of offensive and racist things. Including that the September 11th attacks are an inside job. She recently said that Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian, if she wins in November, quote, the White House will smell like curry. So she responds to this appointment by saying, it's deeply disturbing, this appointment, because she found previous tweets by Sriram Krishnan in which he said that, let me pull up the exact words.

he said that, let me pull up the exact words, anything to remove country caps for green cards slash unlock skilled immigration would be huge. So right after Trump wins, Krishnan basically posts that, basically saying, yes, more skilled immigration. This is what we need. And so Laura Loomer says, no, this is not the America First policy. It's alarming to see the number of career leftists who are now being appointed to serve in Trump's administration when they share views

that are in direct opposition to Trump's America First agenda. And then David Sacks ways in trying to defend Krishnan. You'll be happy to know that no one on the AI team will be working on immigration policy. So their views on green cards will be irrelevant. And basically this becomes a very ugly fight. Loomer starts saying some pretty offensive things, denouncing third world invaders from

India, says our country was built by white Europeans. This becomes a larger battle over why are these venture capitalists and these tech executives in the views of the MAGA right, why are they so set on bringing in more foreign workers rather than hiring Americans? And of course the underlying not so subtle implication is that a lot of these recipients are from India. I believe around 70% of H1B visa recipients have been from India in recent years.

So this takes on like a kind of ugly anti-India tone in a lot of these critiques of the program. And so then Elon gets involved. Elon says there's a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. He says this is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley. And so the other MAGA people push back at him. And then Elon responds, 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 H1B. Take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend." So things are getting pretty ugly. Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist and now another far right commentator chimes in.

He says that, They're recent converts, and we love converts. But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith. Don't come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going be, if you're gonna do that, we're gonna get and we're gonna rip your face off. And then there's another twist when Vivek Ramaswamy joins the conversation.

Tell us everything. Yes, yes, so Vivek, former GOP presidential candidate, biotech CEO, he is going to be running a doge alongside Elon. So he wrote a very lengthy post on X saying, basically defending top tech companies for, in his words, often hiring foreign born and first generation engineers over quote native Americans.

He says, this is because of the C word, culture, because our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s, likely longer. He says that American culture celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, the jock over the valedictorian, and that that's a culture that won't produce the best engineers. He goes further. He trashes American culture for venerating Corey from Boy Meets World.

Okay, could I just ask one more question about the, you know, the written thing that you put a grid on that tells our parents we're idiots? We deserved that one. Instead of watching so many reruns of Friends, Americans need to have more movies like Whiplash, which is the 2014 film about a dark psychological drama about a jazz drummer being psychologically abused into achieving artistic greatness. Walter Ness, you want to clean the blood off my drum set? It's definitely an interesting fight to pick for a new appointee who's going to be supposedly in charge of recommending government spending cuts to be like, actually, I think American culture is bad.

And so there was a big backlash on the right, a further backlash against Vivek now, of course, because he is Indian American, there's a lot of anti-Indian comments and racism being thrown in here. But, you know, on the night that Vivek issued that very long post, there was another post that was interesting coming from a man named Stephen Miller, basically ran immigration policy for Trump's first term and will likely do it again. He's gonna be deputy White House chief of staff.

He posted without explanation, excerpts from a speech Trump gave four years ago, in which Trump praises American culture. We are the culture that put up the Hoover Dam, laid down the highways, and sculpted the skyline of Manhattan. We are the people who dreamed a spectacular dream. It was called Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. So Miller is not directly saying, unlike Vivek Ramaswamy, I think American culture is great, but a lot of people on the right view this

as a sort of coded response to Rameswami. Bannon pointed this out and others saying that, oh, so this is this is kind of interesting. Like this is a guy who's going to hold immense power in the Trump White House who wants to sort of send a message here that he's not on board with the kind of stuff that Viveac is saying. It's a wonderful debate with a lot to think about. But what it comes down to is this was a fight over a particular type of visa that the incoming president is either going to support or not support. Who wins the fight?

Well, that is why Stephen Miller is so important. Because I said before that Trump is his instincts pull him in different directions on H-1Bs, and he says different things at different times. But if you look at his policy in his first term, it was very restrictive. His administration worked kind of tirelessly to try to restrict the program, rein it in. And then when the pandemic broke out, they canceled or they stopped issuing new H1Bs entirely. And that was because of Stephen Miller.

Now the tech people are trying to gain influence in Trump's second term. And that puts them on a collision course with Miller. And so there is going to be a battle for Trump's favor, but there will also be a bureaucratic battle because it's difficult to win a bureaucratic war of attrition with Stephen Miller. What held the expanded Manga coalition together in 2024 was a common enemy. It was Biden, Democrats, the left, wokeness, cancel culture, things like that.

United all of these people and they were on the same team and they were all working to elect Donald Trump. But now that Trump has won, then they have to decide, okay, well, what are we going to actually going to do governing the country? And it turns out that the movement is very divided on that. Our man in Washington, Andrew Prokop, a proc up, another great rift in the MAGA universe. Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. In 2025, Delta Airlines turns 100 years old. That's a century of changing the way we fly,

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His unofficial beat is Elon Musk. All right, even as Elon was X-ing his way through the fight over visas, he was also causing disarray in our nation's capital. Just days earlier, he was stirring the pot on Capitol Hill, making it very clear that he was unhappy with a measure being proposed by the Speaker of the House, the Republican Speaker of the House, to extend spending for a few months to keep the government open. The current bill was scrapped after President-elect Donald Trump and Doge founders Elon Musk and

Vivek Ramaswamy torched the package online. House Republicans have now unilaterally decided to break a bipartisan agreement that they made. In a discord among Republicans this week week could spell trouble for Donald Trump in his second term signaling... They thought they had a deal, and then Elon swooped in and helped torpedo it, generating support against the measure and really showing kind of the power he has to shape debate in Congress among people who are elected, despite the fact he's not elected. How did he go after Johnson's legislation? What did he say exactly?

Oh, he had lots of things to say. He called it criminal on X, one of the worst bills ever written. He said, any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years, and that's quoting from one of his tweets. And then he began praising those people who were coming out and vowing against it, almost trying to encourage people to raise their hand to say, I'm not gonna vote for it in the House. And the Republicans really had a very narrow margin to pass it on a party line. Personally, as a member, I have to vote no, because I'm not voting for this, this kind of garbage. This is a bad bill. It should not pass. Elon Musk is correct. A lot of my

colleagues are correct. In my view, Just days, weeks earlier, it was like a celebratory atmosphere, right? Donald Trump, Dona Mar-a-Lago is club in Florida, Elon Musk there, they're going out in public, being photographed and videoed at numerous events. You think of the Army-Navy football game. And in the background, these pictures, oftentimes Speaker Johnson is there as well. It is kind of creating this image that everybody's working together and excited to be there. And then you have this kind of fracas occur. Now, Speaker Johnson would say that he too didn't like this measure, but it was kind of needed to get done. He talked about how he was in contact with Musk and illustrating that he is trying to stay close to what Elon Musk is thinking and

trying to navigate a very tough situation. I was communicating with Elon last night. Elon and Vivek and I are on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of this. And Vivek and I- Okay, so Johnson's saying, look, it's imperfect, but we have to fund the government. And Musk, who incidentally was not elected and therefore does not have the same kind of pressures as those who serve in Congress, is saying, no, I don't care.

I don't like it. Did Elon Musk get what he wanted? What was the impact of his involvement? Yeah, this is an interesting situation where you have these elected officials at the negotiating table trying to figure things out and then you have Elon Musk kind of hanging over those talks. Speaker Johnson went back, negotiated, and figured out something. Elon came out in support of that. The second attempt didn't pass, but eventually the third measure did.

And essentially, in a lot of ways, Elon got what he wanted because the first measure didn't pass, but he didn't necessarily demonstrate an ability to kind of get people to vote for the slimmed down versions. It's one thing to kind of blow up talks. We've seen some House Republicans in recent years show that ability when there's such a narrow margin of victory. But it's another thing to build a consensus to get legislation passed or build consensus on kind of a way forward on certain things. And so that's kind of what we're looking for from

Elon in the next few weeks and months ahead. You know, this could be a new education for Elon Musk as he goes to Washington. Do you think there is a similarity here between this fight in Congress and this fight online over immigration and Elon Musk playing a role in both? Elon Musk's experience with House Republicans over the spending measure and then his experience with members of the mega party over this skilled immigration issue kind of illustrates that these political battles aren't going to be easy. The Trump victory in November was built by a large coalition of people within that tent. But these two episodes kind of illustrate that he's not afraid of kind of running over people in a way that you don't traditionally see business people

who aren't elected do. That kind of suggests that perhaps he plays the role in a Trump administration where he can be the wild card or he can be the hammer, the threat that's going to be brought in if negotiations don't go the way that Trump or Elon wants. There's always Elon out there who can kind of stir the pot with his echo verse and kind of direct the spotlight of what it's like to be an Elon's kind of laser beam.

It's always there. It's always there as long as, and correct me if I'm wrong here, as long as Elon Musk has Donald Trump. No, you know, it's interesting. One of the things I think people want to know is when do these two guys, these two mercurial, huge ego business people, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, when do they split up? They have a lot of reasons to work together in the months ahead, and they have a lot of baggage, if you will, for why they might not work out together, right?

And the threat of Elon not kind of in the Trump or whatever is a very real threat as well. He has that megaphone. And so does he become a liability? Does he become kind of create problems? I mean, that's kind of the wild card out there, right? But you're right in the fact that by playing nice and being aligned with Trump, he just has so much more power than he's ever had. And that probably underscores why Elon will probably try to work as best as he can

with the Trump administration. But no, he's not going to be president, that I can tell you. And I'm safe, you know why? He can't be. He wasn't born in this country. Maka is a movement of rivals, as are many movements. This enormous coalition of people united to get Donald Trump elected. And yet under the umbrella, there were lots of differing points of view on things like how should the government spend money, how much money, which immigrants should be invited into the country.

We're now seeing a sneak peek at some of those differences playing out in real life. Do you think we're going to see more of this in 2025? Do you think maybe the honeymoon is over between all of these different factions that sought to get Donald Trump into the presidency? I imagine that it's going to be a lot of chaos in the months to come in Washington. He's talked about it. He expects to make people unhappy. He expects to ruffle feathers.

And in part, that's perhaps some of his strength, is that if people are unhappy and they're out there complaining about him, he's kind of accustomed to that, right? I remember once talking to him about, you know, somebody had told him that what his idea wasn't going to work out, it wasn't possible. He's like, well, people always tell me things aren't possible, right? And that's kind of the chip on his shoulder is proving to people that something's not possible is possible.

And you know, he's been told that it's, you can't cut government, that this isn't going to be possible. And he's already working out ways to kind of do that, whether it's with Congress's help or administrative ways or legal ways. He's trying to think outside the box and kind of use the moment to do kind of what he thinks is important. And so by its very nature would suggest there's going to be a lot of fights ahead for Elon Musk in Washington, D.C. Tim Higgins of The Wall Street Journal, thanks to him. Amanda Llewellyn produced today's episode, Amina El-Sadi edited, Patrick Boyden, Rob Byers, engineered and Laura Bullard checked the facts.

I'm Noelle King, it's Today Explained. you