Trump and Musk Give MAGA Masses a Rude Awakening

Trump's supporters never understood the subtleties of the ethnonationalism they were being fed.

Illustration by Donkey Hotey

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In 2024, Donald Trump ran the most zealously ethnonationalist presidential campaign in modern history, which quite reasonably convinced those who voted for him that once he took office, his opposition to all types of immigration would be pure and unbending. After all, the foreign interlopers are “poisoning the blood of our country,” so surely he would uproot these malignant agents of contamination wherever they can be found.

But Trump’s opposition to immigration turns out to have an asterisk or two, and the views of the tech overlords who funded his campaign to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and now expect to get what they paid for — foremost among them Elon Musk — are more complicated still. This has touched off a remarkably nasty intra-MAGA conflict, one that is revealing the intricate weave of hatred and contempt that makes up the fabric of Trump’s coalition.

I’m sure many liberals assume that Trump, his allies, and his voters are just a bunch of xenophobes and racists, full stop. It pays them no compliment to acknowledge that the reality is multilayered, and worth understanding in full.

The split opens

This little war was touched off when Trump announced that Sriram Krishnan, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and buddy of Musk’s, would become a White House advisor on artificial intelligence. This didn’t sit well with some of the more unadulterated bigots in the MAGA auxiliary, including Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, since Krishnan was born and raised in India and has advocated an increase in the allotment of H-1B visas, which are heavily used in the tech industry to bring in workers from overseas.

Things quickly got spicy, with Vivek Ramaswamy posting on X that we need foreign workers because “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Insults started flying back and forth, and it played out like this not-very-complimentary description that Musk endorsed:

Trump finally weighed in to express his support for H-1B visas. That may have surprised some of his supporters, who concluded that when he said immigrants are eating your pets and killing your beautiful white daughters, that meant he doesn’t want any immigrants around. Au contraire.

While for years Republicans have told voters that their opponents want to import hordes of immigrants so they can turn them into voters who will outnumber native-born whites and keep Democrats in office (the “Great Replacement”), some on the right with a firmer connection to reality have pointed out that a side of the American corporate elite, including agribusiness and certain kinds of manufacturing, are quite happy to have large numbers of undocumented workers come and work for low wages with no workplace rights. Those plutocrats, who are not corporate celebrities like the Musks and Zuckerbergs (can you name the CEOs of Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill?), are quite supportive of the Republican Party for its stances on taxes, regulations, and worker rights, even if they have reservations about the GOP’s immigration policies.

But now Republicans, and Trump in particular, are under the sway of a different set of plutocrats with a different immigration agenda. Musk and his tech buddies are mostly concerned about maintaining easy access to foreign talent; in fact, many of them (like Musk) are themselves immigrants. They don’t really care about asylum policy or border enforcement; that’s not where their bread is buttered.

Here’s where the distinctions get interesting. While Musk and other tech bros may from time to time express disgust at the vulgar bigotry of some of Trump’s supporters, it’s not because they believe in the fundamental equality of all human beings. Not in the least. Theirs is a different kind of bigotry, one that sometimes overlaps with racism but is not the same thing.

The tech bro is convinced that he obtained his obscene wealth by virtue of IQ and hard work, with luck playing no role at all. His proper place is at the top of society’s hierarchy; below him are passably worthy people whose labors contribute to his cause of world domination, but who in the end are pretty much interchangeable with one another, the coders and engineers whom he intends to replace before long with AI. Below them are the great masses, troglodytic brutes who are valuable to have as customers but whose ultimate purpose is to behold the masters of humanity in wondrous admiration.

To the tech bro, the H-1B visa program is a matter of genuine concern; the rest of the immigration issue is something you feed the rubes to get them to support your preferred candidates. To be clear, I’m not saying that Musk has unproblematic views. He has said plenty of racist things, and has recently taken on the cause of the German far-right AfD party, which many people describe as neo-Nazi. Precisely why is unclear, but even if it’s only because he believes a revival of the far right in Germany would be beneficial to him and his companies (what could go wrong?), he certainly has no problem with racism so long as it doesn’t impinge on his interests.

Trump, on the other hand, is a bridge between the elite and mass: In substance and policy he favors the exploitative version of immigration policy of the meatpacking magnate, but he speaks the common language of unadorned racial resentment.

What Trump’s actions tell us about his immigration beliefs

While most of the time we should be cautious about judging what is in people’s hearts, there is no doubt that Donald Trump is a genuine bigot; his contempt for non-whites, especially non-white foreigners, has been amply clear for years. But that bigotry exists comfortably alongside Trump’s desire to exploit foreign labor.

While it was long known that Trump legally imports foreign guest workers to cook, clean, and do maintenance at his golf courses, his use of foreign labor has not been restricted to what is within the law. In 2018, a report in the New York Times revealed that undocumented workers are given some of the most intimate tasks attending to Trump and his family, whether it’s making his bed or ensuring he is well-stocked with his preferred brand of makeup. Later reports from the Washington Post revealed a “pipeline” of undocumented workers from Costa Rica to Trump’s properties, and showed how the staff is treated:

Trump’s undocumented workers were forced to smile at the stomach-churning comments from wealthy members once he became president. “You’re still here? How come we can’t get rid of you? I’m going to call Trump, you [expletive] Mexican,” Gabriel Juarez, who had been head waiter for a decade at one of Trump’s New York golf clubs, said a member told him jokingly.

Of course, that member of Trump’s golf club doesn’t really want his waiter deported; the service is too good.

The focus on H1-B visas obscures the fact that as eager as the techno-plutocrats may be to continue bringing in engineers and programmers from overseas, in the long term they see those workers as eminently expendable. Their vision is for a workforce that consists of a small number of bold visionaries at the top, supported by an AI army that has replaced every mid-level employee. But you know who will not be automated out of a job, at least for many decades?

That’s right: The undocumented woman who scrubs Donald Trump’s toilet, and all her coworkers. Those kinds of service jobs held by so many immigrants are the most resistant to automation. Perhaps one day in the future we’ll have robots that can stand in the shower and gently wash down a dementia patient who can no longer accomplish the task themselves, but not anytime soon.

My guess is that if you told the average Trump voter that he employs undocumented workers and has for decades, they’d refuse to believe you. It just doesn’t make sense; how could he so obviously hate immigrants, but also want to exploit them? Of course, it makes perfect sense.

What really unites Trump and Musk

Few things are harder to wrap your head around than the fact that millions of Trump supporters think he is motivated by a deep empathetic concern for them and the country more broadly, that he is some kind of selfless humanitarian who only wants what’s best for others. Yet they do believe it, no matter how many times he has told them otherwise.

In reality, Trump and Musk are both committed to hierarchy, so long as they are at its apex. Like many a tech bro, Trump is obsessed with IQ and believes that his superior genes grant him privileges unavailable to the ordinary pleb. His ambitions may run to the prosaic; he dreams of banging supermodels in a penthouse clad in gold leaf, while Musk wants statues erected across the galaxy to honor his greatness. But they both know that government is operating properly when it showers them with benefits while declining to constrain them in any fashion. They differ in many ways, but they share a conviction that they were made to rule, and the rest of us were made to serve.