MAGA backbiting, infighting may bring down the house

 

For more than a decade, tech billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket-testing facility several miles west of my Central Texas neighborhood has shaken area homes, allegedly cracking the foundations upon which they rest. Debates in the press and on neighborhood apps over whether the roar of rocket engines is actually damaging Waco-area infrastructure often devolves to politics, given Musk's unrestrained, come-to-Jesus advocacy of Donald Trump's return to presidential power.

An 82-year-old country woman recently complained online of homes “damaged by the testing of mega rockets.” A neighbor advised stoicism: “I mean...we sort of voted for this in November. Good luck.” Another defended Musk in run-on glee: “Nobody can go after SpaceX give me a break like Elon said if you don’t like it move.” And when somebody named “Thomas” countered that the manmade earthquakes would only grow worse during Trump 2.0, the run-on guy retorted, again without benefit of periods:

“Thomas, fake news you crybabies will never learn I’m sure he hurt your wittle feelings But the entire country voted for him, and everybody is done with all your woke DEI stuff.”

Now, in what some contend is Musk's “co-presidency” alongside the reality-TV star and business tycoon whose presidential campaign he bankrolled to the tune of some $290 million, the eccentric tech titan unwittingly appears to be doing something that Democrats, RINOs, the FBI, the Department of Justice and legitimate press failed to do: cracking the very foundation of the Make America Great Again movement. But will the fissures spread?

The near-salvation of the first Trump presidency was that, for the most part, Trump was the only bull in the proverbial china shop. Rational, experienced hands sought to temper his excesses, frequently with success. This time, he’ll be one of an entire herd of bulls smashing up the china. This herd includes Musk, whose propensity for popping off indiscriminately has now helped inflame tensions with the leadership of Great Britain, Germany and Canada, all allies, as well as MAGA masterminds such as Steve Bannon.

So far, the biggest clash involves Trump's campaign pledge to undertake mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, a racial cleansing some of his everyday followers have longed for, even if this means booting out a significant part of the U.S. workforce that performs many of the most back-breaking and odious of jobs – everything from busing restaurant tables to picking produce in sun-scorched farm fields to laboring away in highway construction and homebuilding.

As Air Force veteran Lloyd Coffman, a Trump supporter from the Waco suburb of Hewitt, acknowledged during a spirited roundtable discussion of Trump supporters I conducted for the Waco Tribune-Herald just after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, "you’re not going to get the common white boy sitting at home in Hewitt to get out there and work his ass off on that damn hot road all day long." In Coffman’s view, addressing immigration meant rigorously vetting immigrants for employment in America.

Thus, anyone seasoned in business and politics could have predicted that envoys from the farming and construction industries that significantly supported Trump’s reelection would subsequently make entreaties, begging exemption from his ill-defined deportation scheme. MAGA’s nativist natives were always likely to bend to such pleas, given that few “white boys” in Hewitt or anywhere else want to, say, replace shingles on somebody’s roof midsummer.

Musk, however, ended 2024 by pushing MAGA’s buttons, championing exemptions allowing better-educated immigrants to assume or retain reasonably well-paid high-tech vacancies in America through H-1B visas. And when MAGA firebrands such as Steve Bannon condemned this as effectively cheating well-educated Americans of good-paying, high-tech jobs, Musk eclipsed even Trump by overreacting in the most profane of ways.

“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,” the 53-year-old South African-born founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla Motors replied to a critic on “X,” the sprawling social-media platform Musk controls. “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.”

Nor did Vivek Ramaswamy – the 39-year-old Cincinnati-born Indian-American entrepreneur briefly set to preside alongside Musk over the newly forged “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) – exactly calm the waters. Seeking to help Musk in defending H-1B visas for high-tech jobs for non-citizens, Ramaswamy (who has since departed from DOGE) took a devastating but insightful swipe at traditional parts of American culture in which at least some MAGA followers revel.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy posted a day after Christmas as jocks, prom queens, former jocks and former prom queens across the nation celebrated the holidays. “A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”

Ramaswamy went on to say that he knew “multiple sets of immigrant parents in the ’90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity… and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates.” He advised “[m]ore weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”

One can imagine how MAGA world might have reacted had hated presidential contender Kamala Harris dared go to the lengths Ramaswamy did in lambasting Americans for misplaced priorities in raising and educating their children: If your boy was or is a high school jock – or if you were one – and if your daughter’s big dream was a spot on the homecoming queen’s court if not being the queen herself, then your family priorities are all askew, Ramaswamy suggested.

Granted, Musk’s over-the-top defense of H-1B visas for non-citizens is pretty rich after claiming during the 2024 campaign that Democrats were conspiring to overrun polling places in “swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” with undocumented immigrants to foil Trump and snuff out the wishes of citizens – an audacious falsehood from a foreign-born opportunist whose own path from immigrant to citizen remains murky.

Ramaswamy and Musk may be right in their H-1B visa concerns but blunder in insulting MAGA faithful who, unlike these outspoken oligarchs, aren’t Johnny-come-latelys to the Trump revolution, particularly Bannon. In his “War Room” podcasts, the scruffy MAGA visionary has lambasted Musk as a globalist leeching off MAGA, government contracts, taxpayer subsidies, even the Chinese Communist Party, proving that Musk (in Bannon’s words) “would take (a check) from Adolf Hitler himself.”

And when MAGA warriors charged Musk – who proclaims himself a free-speech absolutist – with booting critics of his H-1B advocacy off his social-media platform, Bannon took aim at someone he treats as an MAGA interloper, even infidel: “Now they’re trying to dump the people off the platforms, like that’s going to matter. You can’t stop us – we’re relentless and we’re never going to quit. We’re a thousand times tougher than you guys are, and if you don’t understand that, keep it up.”

Bannon justifies his cynicism about H-1B visas by arguing they provide tech companies such as those Musk oversees with highly skilled non-citizen labor in arrangements that also leave them, in effect, laboring in tech jobs for comparatively low wages in “indentured servitude.” Musk suggests raising the minimum wage for H-1B laborers, though this raises the question of why the government wouldn’t then raise the minimum wage for other, mostly native-born workers in the United States.

Trump, caught in the crossfire and perhaps realizing the global reach through “X” of one far wealthier than he is, may well sense the risks of crossing Musk. In any case, Trump has now flipflopped on his earlier condemnation of H-1B visas, siding with Musk in the MAGA in-house furor. In doing so, Trump confirms, without ever saying so, that Musk is indeed a virtual co-president, the sort that American patriot John Adams so feared in a democracy one day corrupted by the societal idolization of oligarchs.

Yet what sort of co-presidency lies ahead for Musk? Ramaswamy, his partner in the Trump-crafted setup to improve “government efficiency,” made valid points about American society before abandoning his DOGE appointment. But does the federal government, in acknowledging such parental failures and educational shortfalls in preparing native-born youths for high-tech jobs, dare assume a role in reversing matters in a feisty political movement that, first and foremost, wants government out of their lives?

Ramaswamy’s opinions certainly clash with the notion that parents always know best for their kids, a principle driving Republican legislators in Texas seeking to funnel public money into private schools with murky concerns about curriculum and transparency. And the push for apparent Christian indoctrination in Texas public schools in a culture skeptical of everything from Darwin to climate change to vaccines doesn’t bode well in forging a science-savvy generation of native-born talent for future high-tech jobs.

The ideological incoherence in all this – amid other missions Trump vowed to immediately undertake in his presidency, ranging from dramatically slashing grocery and gasoline costs to setting in motion a mass immigrant deportation that may not prove so massive – explains his recent rants about using economic and even military force to reclaim the Panama Canal, annex Greenland and make Canada the 51st state. Such noise distracts from what Trump actually promised voters.

And, whatever else, Trump’s followers are too easily distracted in their unflinching adoration.

Meanwhile, Musk hogs the spotlight and adds to the chaos. Examples? In a post-election dustup that Musk worsened through his online pronouncements, Trump left the sidelines to lambaste Republican Congressman and fiscal hawk Chip Roy of Texas over the latter’s refusal to raise the debt ceiling in deference to Trump, who then dismissed Roy as "just another ambitious guy, with no talent” who deserved to be primaried – a tactical error in a closely divided House of Representatives.

And Musk rained on Trump’s victory lap over saving the Chinese social-media platform TikTok in America by noting the disparity by which TikTok is allowed in the United States but “X” isn’t in China. Musk didn't belabor the point, but it surely prompts reevaluation among any principled MAGA warriors who dutifully endorsed Trump's earlier vilification and attempted ban of TikTok because, to quote Trump back then, it would "allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information."

And Musk played party pooper at a party to which he apparently wasn’t invited, poo-pooing Trump’s White House announcement of a $500 billion AI infrastructure joint venture (to be set in Abilene) and funded in part by OpenAI. In doing so, he got into an online pissing match with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that made headlines. Trump played subsequently explained that, of the high-tech officials introduced, “Elon, one of the people [in the venture] he happens to hate. But I have certain hatreds of people too.”     

Complicating all this is the fact MAGA fuses are short. After Republican state legislators – almost all vocal supporters of Trump – split over election of a new Texas House of Representatives speaker this month and West Texas Republican Dustin Burrows prevailed with a mix of Republican and Democratic support, enraged Republican hardliners vowed to censure Burrows and his Republican supporters, then use a Republican Party of Texas rule to formally prevent them from running as Republicans in 2026.

“I look forward to seeing if they’re still laughing after the next round of primaries,” hardline Republican legislator Shelley Luther posted, displaying seething, eat-our-own resentment toward fellow Republicans after the Burrows victory. “The fight starts today.” To which a Coast Guard veteran and self-described follower of Jesus Christ left this amen online: “Let the censures begin. Every Republican that supported @Burrows4TX should be censured and excluded from the 2026 primary ballot.”

Disaster may have been avoided by a subsequent vote to forbid members of the House’s minority party – in this case, Democrats – from chairing House committees, long a sore point among Republican hardliners.

And finally, if reporting by POLITICO is accurate, Musk was responsible for pushing partner Ramaswamy out of the DOGE setup that Trump tapped both to head up. While Ramaswamy reportedly irked a number of Republicans in Trump’s circle during this period, the “ill-received holiday rant on ‘X’ by Ramaswamy about H-1B visas apparently hastened his demise.” No word on whether anyone voiced reservations about Musk’s telling an H-1B critic online to “FUCK YOURSELF in the face.”

With no one left to fight in the arena but one another, such MAGA-versus-MAGA spectacles demonstrate how far America is into the “bread-and-circuses” phase of its decline. The electorate has its reality-TV president back and those who aren’t part of all this infighting must nonetheless brace for tumult, “Survivor” style. That includes Sara Oliver, 82, who announced online she had finally found an attorney to sue SpaceX for damaging her 116-year-old pier-and-beam home in the Central Texas town of Lorena, population 1,700.

Whether out of old-styled chamber-of-commerce fervor or idolization of anyone proclaiming allegiance to Trump in the gleeful way Musk has, many in a political movement primarily driven by grievance and resentment promptly disparaged Oliver. This included a man in a nearby upscale community who haughtily suggested Oliver’s grievance didn’t rate in MAGA world where apparently only certain people’s grievances really matter: “SpaceX is more important than your poorly built house.”

And a woman in nearby Hewitt didn’t hide her pre-inaugural joy in cavalierly dismissing her neighbor’s fears about all the rocking and rattling. “SpaceX has sure been busy this morning… early testing was loud and long and just now, a short one… it’s music to my ears,” she posted in response. “It serves as a reminder that in just 5 days, America is on the way to becoming great again. With Trump back at the helm and Elon and Vivek heading DOGE, I have no doubt that great things are coming for all Americans.”

Oliver, a former Republican whose family once constituted the only Republicans in Lorena – and who even voted for Trump in the 2016 Republican primary election because "I thought he'd be better than (Ted) Cruz" – understands all the sniping and cheap shots and threats, whether between titanic MAGA figures such as Bannon and Musk or everyday folks such as herself and fellow citizens living in a gently rolling swath of right-wing Texas where Trump chose to launch his 2024 reelection campaign.

Consequently, Oliver takes neighbors’ smug put-downs and jeers in stride, even as she dreads more earthshaking developments than Musk’s rocket-testing in the nearby town of McGregor.

"Honey, I'm not never going to vote Republican again unless – what was that young lady that told the truth, the pretty dark-haired girl [Cassidy Hutchinson] that sat down and testified and testified and told the truth? If she runs, she's the kind of Republican I grew up with, people that were educated and intelligent and had the good of the country (in mind),” Oliver told me. “They were business people but, you know, they weren't this crap that claims to be Republican and is actually fascist today.”

Described by one of his editors as “an equal-opportunity skeptic” and one of his readers as a "modern-day Don Quixote" (for better or worse), Bill Whitaker in November 2020 retired from Texas journalism after a career of nearly 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist. He served as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor during his final dozen years in the profession.