Elon Musk is already destroying Trump’s MAGA movement

The shadow president does not have the populist touch

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.

For those who celebrate, I hope that you had an excellent Christmas and/or Hanukkah, and for those who don’t, I hope your week is going well and you’re enjoying some time off from work anyway.

Tonight, we’ll catch up on some news stories and then dive into the civil war in MAGA world, why it runs far deeper than nasty tweets about immigrants, and how various policies could cost Republicans the working class voters that they poached from Democrats this year.

Note: This is a fully independent newsletter — no ads, no sponsors, no politicians able to apply pressure or influence what we cover and write. Progress Report relies entirely on readers and supporters willing to fund independent journalism and political thought.

This election showed that progressives desperately need to build up their own alternative political media infrastructure, and for just $5 a month, you can help keep us afloat and build the movement.

---

---

Minnesota: Democrat Curtis Johnson will not appeal a judge’s decision to block him from taking his seat in the state legislature, giving Republicans a temporary one-seat majority when the chamber opens for business next month.

Johnson was disqualified due to his failure to meet residency requirements after Republicans discovered that he’d never truly moved into the studio apartment in Roseville listed as his home address. The candidate, who claimed that he had a hard time finding a house to purchase, instead lived with his family in a neighboring district.

The one-seat GOP majority will allow Republicans to choose a speaker and set operating rules that will remain in place even if — and very likely when — a Democrat wins the special election for Johnson’s seat on January 28th.

Missouri: Republican lawmakers have discussed ways to curtail the impact of a voter-approved ballot initiative that will raise the state’s minimum wage and guarantee workers the right to paid sick leave. The effort likely poses a bigger threat to the results of the initiative than lawsuits filed by the business community, which seek to overturn the entire new law.

GOP lawmakers have long griped about voters’ tendency to approve progressive ballot measures, and last year, they nearly advanced a constitutional amendment to reduce their prevalence. Murmurs about its revival recently inspired a bipartisan group of activists to launch a campaign to qualify an amendment that would protect ballot measures from political interference. More on that in the weeks to come.

Snow job: Ski patrollers and mountain safety workers in Park City are on strike after nearly nine months of unproductive contract negotiations with Vail Resorts, which owns the high-end resort in Utah. The strike was called after a mediated negotiation session failed to produce a breakthrough on economic terms, with Vail refusing to budge from its proposal of a 0.5% pay increase.

The union has been working without a contract for the entire ski season, and as the local’s president told me last week, believe that Vail is slow-walking negotiations so that any pay raises have minimal impact on the company’s profit margin. The rising cost of housing in the region has made it almost untenable for most workers to live anywhere near the mountain, with some forced to live in Salt Lake City.

Vail is bringing in non-union workers to take over the ski patrol, so the union has called for a boycott of the company’s properties.

---

The MAGA meltdown has just begun

Donald Trump won the November election on the strength of a multiethnic, economically diverse coalition built by promising to be everything to everyone. Now, that coalition is at risk of imploding before Trump even moves back into the White House.

Since Sunday, MAGA world has been embroiled in a messy brawl that began with Trump’s decision to name Indian-born venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an AI policy adviser. When the nativist right discovered that Krishnan had previously advocated for lifting the cap on the H1-B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers, all hell broke loose, leading to a multi-layered brawl with major implications.

The first civil war

Many of Trump’s ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley backers went to bat for both Krishnan and the visa program, which has become a key pipeline for tech workers. Their defensiveness only further stoked the anger of the online right. Even Elon Musk, patron saint of the alt-right for turning Twitter into a cesspool of white nationalism and spending heavily to help Trump retake the presidency, was not spared blowback for entering the fray.

A former H1-B visa holder himself, Musk sought to defend the program as a necessary tool to fuel American innovation and competitiveness, a comment that simultaneously exalted foreign workers while demeaning Americans in the eyes of true MAGA adherents. The United States simply did not produce enough talent to satisfy the growing demand for top-tier engineers and programmers, Musk asserted, displaying both his political inexperience and social cluelessness.

Seeking to clarify his remarks, Musk later likened the program to NBA teams drafting top international players like league MVP Nikola Jokić and French phenom Victor Wembanyama, the implication being that these skilled workers are the cream of the crop and nothing like the ostensibly dangerous undocumented immigrants who he wants to see deported en masse.

Musk also retweeted posts from other newly pro-Trump tech execs in favor of foreign worker visas, but it did nothing to placate the racist Groyper types who Musk had so carefully cultivated; incensed, they fired off one anti-Elon meme after another, the equivalent of kryptonite for the world’s richest and loneliest man. Some were explicitly racist, while others hammered Musk for caving to their boogeyman version of DEI, which has come to represent anything that does not result with white people on top.

(This only days after Musk went to war on Wikipedia for announcing that a third of its budget would go toward DEI efforts this coming year. There is no satiating the seething hatred ingrained in the incel army that Musk has spent so much time courting.)

The right-wing populists of MAGA world also turned on Musk, seizing on the opportunity after watching the billionaire replace them at Trump rallies and the top of the guest list at Mar-a-Lago. Far-right provocateur Laura Loomer posted Tesla’s job listings for H-1B visa holders, alleging that Musk isn’t so much interested in hiring the best and brightest as he is suppressing the salaries of engineers and other skilled workers.

Loomer is a vicious racist and disturbed Trump sycophant who was rightfully banned from Twitter before Musk purchased it, but she’s not wrong about Musk’s hiring record. He has overseen callously dangerous manufacturing plants with flagrantly racist environments, resulting in physical and mental trauma for thousands of workers. Musk has also fired anyone who has tried to organize a union at one of his facilities or offices. This year, Tesla applied for more than new and ongoing 2,000 H-1B visas, a high number for a relatively small company. By comparison, General Motors applied for 750 in 2023.

Whether H-1B visas actually result in lower wages for domestic workers has long been debated, and recent regulations have sought to ensure a prevailing wage for visa holders (whether or not that actually happens is another story). But this battle is less about economics so much than it is about each side’s sense of cultural and personal superiority, an underlying tension that Musk exacerbated to hasten the collapse of this coalition.

MAGA vs Tech Bro

Those tensions were inflamed on Thursday when Vivek Ramaswamy, a child of Indian immigrants, posted a series of tweets that accused Americans of coddling their kids, dumbing down their culture, rewarding mediocrity, and producing people who are too lazy and stupid to do important science-related work. It was a screed burning with the anger of a high school nerd with a chip on his shoulder, a speech that their supervillain persona might give midway through the movie.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” Ramaswamy wrote. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

(The whole thing is worth a read, but this part is particularly depressing: “More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”)

Ramaswamy, in speaking about white people the same way that many white people speak about minorities, triggered a tidal wave of angry responses, largely split between two categories: vile racism and a re-evaluation of his own huckster business practices, including how he became a billionaire by peddling a failed Alzheimer’s drug.

The second civil war

Originally built on the grievances of the white working class, racism of the alt-right, and strategic acquiescence of the Federalist Society wing, MAGA was fueled this year by the bank accounts and internet influence of libertarian tech billionaires. They were united by superficial rhetoric emphasizing freedom and a mutual dislike for anything “woke,” but their politics of self-aggrandizement and borderless neo-fascism are the antithesis of both the populism and conservative orthodoxy that awkwardly co-existed in the original MAGA coalition.

The Wall Street and Silicon Valley wings of the coalition are bridged by investors and fiscal conservatives. They’re firmly on the same side of the visa debate — big business and tech companies applied for huge numbers of the H-1B visas after holding mass layoffs last year — but the GOP’s drift toward more working class populism, performative or not, means that they can’t just write off the criticism as racist.

JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and a number of other leading Republican lawmakers have consciously worked to build up credibility with unions and working class Americans, in part by advocating for expanding the social safety net and marching with striking workers on picket lines. They’ve also been outspoken in their dislike for business consolidation, even offering rare GOP support for outgoing FTC chair Lina Khan. This has also led to further GOP scrutiny of free trade deals and rhetorical support for American workers. Steve Bannon has gone so far as to say that he wants to see tax increases on the rich.

All of this populism was great for courting working class voters and giving them permission to vote for Republicans. But now that Trump is in the thrall of the techno-libertarians, their pledges and proposals, which already ran counter to GOP orthodoxy and the plans outlined in Project 2025, are now coming up against the buzzsaw of Musk and Ramaswany’s mission to take a buzzsaw to federal spending.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post ran a feature on working class and low income voters in New Castle, PA, a former industrial town that went red for the first time in nearly 70 years. Most people in the town rely on some form of government benefits, and many told the paper that they believed that Trump would protect the social safety net.

“He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” Lori Mosura, a 55-year-old single mother and former Democrat, told the paper. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”

Steve Tillia, a 59-year-old on Social Security disability and food stamps, drives a truck with a giant Trump flag and believes that the deep cuts that Musk and Ramaswany have planned would only target the federal workforce.

“It’s not cutting government programs, it’s cutting the amount of people needed to run a program,” he said. “They are cutting staff, which could actually increase the amount of the programs that we get.”

The unfortunate truth is that Republicans are already plotting out how to severely curtail most social safety net programs in one way or another to pay for a new round of tax cuts for the richest Americans.

On health care, work requirements and mid-year purges could be added to some or all states’ Medicaid programs, and funding may be significantly reduced with the introduction of block grants. Middle class Americans are also likely facing trouble, as Affordable Care Act subsidies are due to expire next year. The new Congress has also discussed limiting food stamp usage and ending the annual increases to the program, while disability programs are also in the crosshairs.

Republicans came close to implementing some of these policies during Trump’s first two years in office, but only got as far as granting waivers for Medicaid work requirements before their attempt to end the ACA lost them their House majority. Trump tends to have more populist instincts than other Republicans when it comes to the promises he makes, but conservatives just spent the past four years formulating detailed plans to remake the federal government and see this moment as their best opportunity to do so.

Trump bristles at the idea of being indebted to Elon Musk, and he clearly gets his biggest kicks from the fawning attention he receives from working class voters. At the same time, he stocked his cabinet with prominent Project 2025 contributors and nearly a dozen billionaires, indicating that as in his first term, he is happy to sign laws that further enrich his benefactors and wealthy peers. Clearly, the issues that unite these factions, including racial animus and bullying of trans people, are not as powerful as what divides them.

We know that the next two years will bring a slew of radical policies that harm some of the most vulnerable people in the country. At the moment, the various factions on the right are battling for influence over just which groups are targeted and who will benefit from their suffering. How Trump decides the winners and losers will determine whether his broad coalition can last beyond his presidency, or as with everything else he’s ever built, it ends up in disappointment for everyone but himself.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!