WASHINGTON
\nWith Donald Trump\u2019s allies in open warfare ahead of his inauguration, analysts see the latest hostilities between his billionaire backers and working-class base as a preview of tensions that threaten to shatter his fragile coalition.
\nThe furor over whether to welcome skilled foreign workers has exposed deep fault lines between the hardcore immigration hawks who have been with Trump from the start and the \u201ctech bros\u201d who spent a fortune getting the Republican re-elected.
\nThreatening to grow into an irreparable schism, the row has prompted leading lights in Trump\u2019s \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d (MAGA) crusade to highlight what they see as the absurdity of a supposedly populist movement where the mega-rich call the shots.
\n\u201cI think this most recent war of words between traditional MAGA and big-tech MAGA was an opening salvo in a long-running battle over the future of the MAGA movement,\u201d political analyst Flavio Hickel told media.
\nLeading the Silicon Valley faction is Elon Musk, the South African-born SpaceX and Tesla boss, who shelled out at least $250 million to bankroll the Trump campaign, even as the candidate pushed scare stories about a migrant-led crime wave that never was.
\nMusk\u2019s money was a boon, but the world\u2019s richest man found himself a target of MAGA after supporting visas for skilled foreigners, apparently unaware that his new allies\u2019 anti-immigrant animus extends to his own employment practices.
\nHickel characterized Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and several other tech tycoons Trump has tapped in advisory roles as \u201cideologically libertarian\u201d and favoring traditional conservative priorities like balanced budgets and expansive legal immigration. \u201cTraditional MAGA seems to care little about the budget and found Trump\u2019s nativism to be the most appealing feature of his candidacies,\u201d the politics professor, who teaches at Maryland liberal arts school Washington College, told mediaS.
\nIn MAGA\u2019s first internal conflagration since November\u2019s election — dubbed \u201cOligarchs vs. Nativists\u201d by the US media — Musk called his critics among the Trumpist base \u201ccontemptible fools\u201d who should be rooted out.
\nSteve Bannon, an ex-White House strategist and MAGA media star, retaliated with a threat on his War Room podcast to \u201crip (Musk\u2019s) face off\u201d on New Year\u2019s Eve, warning the tycoon not to \u201cgo to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people.\u201d
\nEchoing concerns that Trump\u2019s billionaire supporters have never really understood his appeal to blue-collar voters, Bannon told Musk and other \u201crecent converts\u201d to \u201csit back and study\u201d MAGA\u2019s stance on keeping US jobs for Americans. Bannon and others have demanded \u201creparations\u201d from Silicon Valley for cutting Americans out of jobs. The MAGA rabble-rouser said the visa issue is \u201ccentral to the way they gutted the middle class in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON With Donald Trump\u2019s allies in open warfare ahead of his inauguration, analysts see the latest hostilities between his billionaire backers and working-class base as a preview of tensions that threaten to shatter his fragile coalition. The furor over whether to welcome skilled foreign workers has exposed deep fault lines between the hardcore immigration hawks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-453737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n