MAGA Is Already Eating Its Own. Pass the Popcorn

Dear Laura Loomer: You weren't in on the con. You were one of the marks.

Like many observers, I expected severe buyers’ regret fairly early in the second Trump administration. After all, many Americans who voted for Trump did so because they believed he would bring down grocery prices. He was never going to be able to deliver on that promise and stopped talking about the subject as soon as the election was over; sooner or later, voters were going to notice.

I did not, however, expect a MAGA civil war weeks before Trump had even taken office. But in retrospect I should have seen it coming.

Background: Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.

What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.

The immediate issue was the H-1B visa program, which grants technical workers (I hate the term “high-skilled,” for reasons I’ll explain in a minute) temporary rights to work in the United States. It’s a program greatly favored by the tech bros, for obvious reasons, but hated by original MAGAts, who believe those jobs should be going to the native-born. But the rift surely runs much deeper. After all, billionaires like their cheap immigrant labor, but original MAGA will feel betrayed if Trump doesn’t deliver mass deportations.

News reports on this dispute get the facts right, but you don’t get a proper sense of the emotions and the character of the participants unless you read some of the posts on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter — a toxic site these days, not to be entered without personal protection equipment, but still useful to get the pulse of the people taking over America. Here, for example, is an exchange between Musk and Steve Bannon:

One especially striking thing in this discussion has been the open contempt tech-bro MAGA has for U.S. workers, the people Trump supposedly champions (and the people who buy his sneakers and crypto.) Here’s Vivek Ramaswamy saying that we need foreign workers because American culture venerates “mediocrity over excellence”:

And here’s Musk endorsing the claim that American workers are “retarded”:

As usual, imagine the reaction if a prominent supporter of Democrats were to say anything remotely like this.

What about the actual economics? The Steve Bannon/Laura Loomer view that immigrants are taking jobs away from white Americans (let’s not be euphemistic) is wrong. Although Loomer accuses Musk of “wanting us to live like a bunch of welfare queens,” immigration makes most native-born Americans, including most blue-collar workers, richer, although there are surely a few losers, including, yes, American-born engineers competing with H-1B hires.

But the benefits from immigration don’t come from immigrants being smarter or having a better work ethic than the native-born. They come from the fact that immigrants bring skills that are relatively scarce among native-born workers. And I mean skills of any kind, including the skills required in many kinds of manual work, which is why I hate applying the term “skilled” only to jobs that require an engineering degree.

When workers with these skills come here, those native-born workers who do have similar skills face increased competition — but their losses, while real, are outweighed by the gains to the much larger number of Americans who aren’t competing with the immigrants.

Imagine, for example, that America were to experience a large influx of Polish plumbers. (As I said, skill isn’t the same as having a degree.) This would push down wages for plumbers already here, but it would reduce the cost of plumbing, raising real wages for everyone else, and overall real income for the native-born would increase.

There would be some losers in this case. And many economists, myself included, used to believe that immigration of workers with low formal education put downward pressure on wages of all less-educated workers. But at this point it’s clear that immigrants tend to concentrate in very different industries and occupations than native-born workers with similar amounts of schooling, suggesting that they have different skills, and that the number of native-born workers hurt by immigration is relatively small. For the most part, immigrants are complements, not substitutes, for native-born workers.

So original MAGA is wrong to claim that immigration is impoverishing “real Americans” in general. But tech-bro MAGA is wrong as well as offensive in saying that we need foreign workers because Americans are stupid or lazy. Furthermore, the availability of less expensive foreign tech workers does reduce the incentive of tech firms to train a home-grown work force and undermines the political incentive to improve our education system.

I’d still argue that something like H-1B makes America richer and stronger, especially given the spillovers generated by a successful technology sector. But Muskaswamy and friends aren’t helping their case by insulting Americans’ culture and intelligence.

So where is Trump coming down on all this? It has always been clear that he shares the tech bros’ contempt for ordinary Americans, but is he willing to openly sell out his MAGA base? Why, yes:

Trump is, of course, lying — the workers on his properties are mainly on a different kind of visa, and he’s rewriting his own history of hostility to H-1B. But the main point is that after Elon Musk told Trump loyalists to fuck themselves in the face, Trump sided with … Musk.

Up next: China. Wanna bet whose interests will be served?

Dear Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon et al: You weren’t in on the con. You were among the marks.

MUSICAL CODA

Obviously:

But I’m ashamed to admit that, great as it is, this song also makes me think of this:

I feel BAD