Bridging the Halves of the Trump Coalition

Where the Loomer Musk spat comes from.

Even before Trump assumes office, a minor but symbolic spat has broken out between the very different branches of the political coalition that swept him to election victory. It started when Trump declared that Indian born, naturalised US citizen Sriram Krishnan would be appointed to a newly created role as Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence. In many ways this might have seemed not that significant a move, and certainly one justified in terms of expertise given Krishnan’s success as a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, though, what seems a pretty understandable appointment in terms of whether the person chosen is fitted for the role soon became embroiled in wider issues, primarily due to a belligerently sceptical response led by popular MAGA figure Laura Loomer and an immediate and increasingly vituperative response to that intervention from Elon Musk and to a lesser extent Vivek Ramaswamy.

The cause of disagreement centres on Krishnan’s previously declared positions on immigration. Like Musk, the Madras born entrepreneur is an immigrant to the US, as are many key figures in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley tech companies. Krishnan had strongly supported provisions making high skilled immigration in the tech industry easier and Loomer pointed out that this was a difficult fit to her particular vision of what the MAGA project was about.

The tension here is an obvious one and reflects to an extent just how successful Trump was in bringing together otherwise mutually suspicious supporters. Long term Populist MAGA backers see Trump as the person who is committed to strong borders and protecting a specifically American way of life. He is the man who promised to Build the Wall, and the man whose absence was followed by a flood of illegal immigration and a Biden administration determinedly throwing open the borders leading to increased crime and a very real sense that the Washington elite were deliberately trying to destroy America and using mass immigration as the weapon by which to achieve it.

Estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the US from the Biden years can run into the tens of millions, with at least 20 million being likely, and it’s an existential, core issue for many of the people who supported Trump throughout the Biden period. The vast majority of Republican voters, and even many people without a declared party preference, had begun to see the border crisis as a genuine threat not just to their own safety and security, but to the very existence of their nation, especially if the rates of illegal entry continued at the same level. Hideous incidents such as an innocent woman being burned alive on the New York subway by a psychopathic immigrant, or apartment blocks being taken over by armed South American gangs, make the subject of the dangers of unrestrained immigration too urgent to be downplayed by the usual liberal media dishonesty on the topic.

In other words, now that Trump will be the President again, long term supporters wish to hold him to his previous rhetoric and policy declarations regarding mass immigration. They are looking forward to the deportations that Democrat supporters fear and loathe. They want not just a strong, protected border where illegal crossings are severely reduced, but something done about the millions of people who are in the country illegally already. People who feel this way have been supporting Trump throughout his whole political journey precisely because he has at times seemed like the only person taking their fears seriously and refusing to dismiss them as racists or bigots. Trump, of course, has had those labels flung at him too, and has despite that remained steadfastly wedded to the tough immigration stance his core voters want. Trump, like them, sees it as a matter of national survival and as an obvious moral duty of government. A secure border, a large scale deportation policy, and listening to ordinary people who oppose mass immigration is in MAGA terms (and in standard conservative and patriotic terms everywhere until very recently) both a pragmatic and a moral necessity.

A country can’t afford or survive millions of illegal arrivals.Economic ruin and social collapse will follow, as symptomatic indicators such as soaring spending levels and spreading tent cities and rising crime rates all testify. MAGA voters (accurately) see lax immigration rules and open borders as a gross betrayal of the governments duty of care towards its existing citizens. They see the Biden Years as a direct betrayal of the American people and the protection of the border as synonymous with the protection of the citizen. When Democrats, churches or charities or NGOs and all the apparatus of the State, as well as the consensus progressive morality held by celebrities and talking heads, focuses on the plight of refugees and migrants and the need to assist them, these voters see it as proof that the system has stopped caring about them.

And they are of course right.

It’s into this sensitive context that even the appointment of an AI consultant can stray.

Trump’s tech industry supporters are much more recent arrivals in the tent. Much of Silicon Valley has been, for many years, as overwhelmingly Democrat as the education sector. Globalist progressivism was enthusiastically adopted by many tech professionals at all grades of the industry, as the staff at Twitter pre-Musk or the woke agendas pushed by major computer gaming companies indicate. Tech billionaires donated heavily to Democrats and were prominent among those sneering at Trump and his supporters until very recently. Mark Zuckerberg was perhaps the most obvious of these when pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into seizure of part of the electoral process in 2020, but many others were strongly opposed to Trump and prepared to spend big to show it. Of course there are long standing tech billionaires who leaned Republican long before Elon Musk was convinced to start backing Trump, but Peter Thiel for instance will still have found that many of the people in his industry are liberal progressives.

The tech industry support for Trump is a little more complex than the populist and nationalist support for him. Musk and Vivek represent that rather well. Vivek of course stood against him as a Republican Presidential candidate but distinguished himself as a rival with a very gracious and respectful approach to Trump. Whether purely strategic or genuinely felt, the manner of Vivek’s opposition contrasted strongly with that of neocon Never Trumpers and those who repeated Democrat rhetoric about unfitness for office and ‘insurrection’ on Jan 6th, setting Vivek up as a natural fit in terms of being the kind of defeated opponent who could be easily welcomed into a Trump administration. Musk’s journey to support was less obviously oppositional to start with since he was never a rival nominee, but was nevertheless more reluctant and more a development over a sustained period of time. In part Musk was driven into Trump’s arms, like other classical liberals, by the sheer fanaticism and lunacy of the modern Democrats.

The meeting of minds for Trump and the tech industry giants is of course predicated on Trump’s own status as a businessman. Trump benefitted from the economic incompetence of the Biden administration, a trait which divides different types of billionaire. For many of the super rich, the general success or failure of the economic policy of the nation they are living in is a redundant topic. They don’t care if the economy is struggling in ways that affect ordinary people or much poorer people, since none of those issues impact them. They can be keen on damaging policies that divert public funds to them and their investments, for instance, or they can be financial speculators who make sudden vast profits when a national economy falters. If things get too bad, they relocate to a different country. For many, the majority of their investments aren’t even in America anymore. But Trump’s business approach is not like that. Trump has an old fashioned conception that the national economy should be run like a business you want to succeed, not one you are asset stripping or profiteering from. His businesses interests are very much centred at home. He wants and needs as both a nationalist and an investor to see the US doing well. The tech figures drawn to him were those who happened to share this view of how the economy should be approached.

In other words, he drew in the tech figures who wanted a generally successful economy, and who saw the success of their enterprises as linked to that general prosperity and general economic competence. With Musk in particular, such figures were not looking for Ponzi schemes or subsidy farms, but a much more traditional regulation light framework within which entrepreneurs could innovate and power an economy stripped of red tape and State interference. Musk gradually came to see Trump as a person who would potentially free American business of the dead hand of government, empowering innovators such as himself to be even more successful. Trump’s distaste for bad deals and his real estate acumen regarding large projects that have to be efficient and timely would unlock American potential in ways beneficial both to Elon’s own businesses and to his personal desire to see a tech led economic boom period. While Trump tends to think in terms of more concrete and traditional industries than Musk does, the Trump ‘drill baby drill’ attitude to fracking for example is exactly the kind of off-the-leash, let her rip attitude to rapid development that Musk gets personally excited about. The deal there is an unwritten understanding that both believe very strongly that government should get out of the way of great men and profitable businesses.

Other tech industry titans were gradually persuaded that wanting to make the economy great may indeed be a prerequisite for doing so, buying in as much to Elon and Vivek’s enthusiasm for an unlocking of US business potential as much as they were buying into any memory of the strong pre COVID economy of Trump’s first term. What we see here then is two different routes towards supporting Trump, both of which are highly logical given Trump’s own nature as a nationalist entrepreneur.

The nationalist route to Trump expects him to deliver on massively reduced immigration, large scale deportations, strong border security and putting the interests, prosperity and safety of Americans first.

The entrepreneurial route to Trump expects him to deliver on massively reduced regulation, cutting through red tape and federal impositions on business, and delivering a boom economy template that’s unaffected by ideology or bureaucracy.

And it’s on immigration that these two things can seem directly opposed.

Figures like Loomer are extremely sensitive to any hint that prioritising existing Americans and tackling mass immigration is going to take a back seat to demands from Corporate America. They have seen Globalist business prioritise the offshoring of industry and the importation of cheap workers over blue collar US jobs and over social cohesion and public safety for decades. What they fear most is another betrayal on immigration, since they have experienced that time and time again from pre Trump and anti Trump Republican Party leaders and a ‘rightwing’ business class that are much more in love with cheap labour than they are with American voters or a cultural loyalty to an America a populist can recognise.

Tech titans whose industry is reliant on the importation of high skilled workers from India and China are uniquely unfitted to understand these concerns, perhaps even less so than Country Club Republicans are. And it shows. The tech side of the enlarged MAGA tent consider it simple common sense to distinguish high skilled workers from low skilled workers or from criminal illegal arrivals who won’t work at all. For them addressing public concerns about mass immigration and open borders couldn’t possibly include AI developers, foreign born MIT graduates and the world’s best computer programmers. There’s a personal animus to this too, of course, which flows in both directions.

When MAGA figures object to foreign tech specialists and innovators being given easier access to US residency and citizenship or even being actively recruited abroad to work in US companies, a Musk or a Krishnan might well consider that a personal insult, a person being rejected for being in a category that defines them too. Tellingly, when a commentator went to the (tiresome) implication that Krishnan’s appointment could only be objected to because a lot of people ‘don’t like seeing Indian names’ Musk agreed. While having on many occasions shown exasperation with the Democrat practice of framing everything as racism and white supremacism, as soon as the traditional MAGA base differs with him on an immigration issue Musk falls back on the same kind of assumption.

For people such as Musk, this is an issue of attracting key talent, and objection to the importation of high skilled workers from abroad is both damaging to US prospects and reflective of a kind of knuckle dragging bigotry. In this, his reaction or Vivek’s reaction shows the ways they remain, due to their own elite circumstances, far closer to the Globalists they have left than the MAGA movement they have joined. They seem to have been both surprised and offended by a strong immigration angle developing from the appointment of Krishnan.

But really they are foolish to be surprised at all, and inaccurate too if they think the reaction can be ascribed to pure bigotry. For the MAGA base this has a personal dimension too. The prior comments of Krishnan, the tech industry demand for special immigration exceptions, and the sneering Musk labelling of them as racists is all a case of immigrants demanding more immigration, indistinguishable from Democrat attitudes and prejudices. It’s another instance of legitimate fears being dismissed by people in an elite class, and that class issue is a far more potent motivation for push back than any specific racism (whose invocation remains a smear without supporting evidence).

For the nationalist or populist, the crisis of mass immigration and open borders is such that ALL exceptions and demands for special treatment are suspicious, especially coming from corporate sources or from fresh allies yet to prove their worth in delivering anything better than a Democrat would.

The split, then, is a real one, reflective of profound differences of experience based on social position. It’s easy to say ‘of course thousands of high skilled workers should be imported’ if you live in the class and industry that benefits from that. It’s much less obviously good for everyone if you worry about that being a precedent allowing other exceptions, or if you wonder why your own powerful nation apparently can’t produce this class of worker despite a vast educational infrastructure.

It’s less of a significant moment, though, than the mainstream media hope. Just as Trump seems unusually able to balance a mix of economic protectionism and free trade that works, I think he will be able to bridge these different demands on him from the disparate forces he gathered together. He is, after all, both of the things he is being asked to be, both a nationalist who wants to put his own people first, and an entrepreneur who wants to free them from the shackles of State mismanagement. The sensible option is to deal with the immigration promises that free the country from the burden of millions of illegal entrants. If that is tackled seriously first, many in the MAGA base would I believe accept a delay on some very specific high skilled sectors….provided they can see measures coming (like better tech training of existing US citizens) that will within a reasonable period address this too.

What you can’t do is assume that a compromise there is a betrayal of the whole project, or talk about objections to high tech exceptions in ways that sound like Democrat sneers. The likes of Loomer will need to be a bit more patient, and the likes of Musk a bit more diplomatic, but nationalist entrepreneurial spirit is a perfectly possible combination to realise.