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THE PLUTOCRACY WINS ANOTHER ROUND AGAINST MAGA NATION  
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Timothy Noah
December 30, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Elon Musk emerged victorious in Trumpworld’s first fight over
foreign-born tech workers. But underneath Laura Loomer’s hateful
rhetoric lies a legitimate concern. _

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Is the Trump coalition coming apart before the Trump administration
even begins? That seemed possible amid last week’s cage
match between Elon Musk and Laura Loomer
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This conflict previewed divisions that will make the Trump White
House leak to reporters like a sieve. But the plutocrats almost always
win, and they did so here.

The fight pitted the anti-immigrant wing of Trump’s coalition
against the people President Theodore Roosevelt famously
labeled malefactors of great wealth
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Stripped of its racially toxic content, it was a dispute over whether
the United States should grant more visas to high-skilled foreign
guest workers. On Saturday, Trump ended the argument by declaring
himself in favor of the H-1B program, which admits as guest workers
foreigners of “distinguished merit or ability
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them in tech. Trump told
[[link removed]] the_ New
York Post_: “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in
favor of the visas. That’s why we have them.”

You’d think that Trump’s declarative stance in favor of the
plutocrats would drive away his true believers. But that never
happened in Trump’s first term and it’s unlikely to in his second.
In cultlike fashion, the MAGA faithful, guided by chief propagandist
Steve Bannon, accept whatever crumbs Trump tosses their way.

Trump has not always been in favor of the visas. In a March 2016 CNN
debate
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Trump had this to say:

I know the H-1B very well. And it’s something that I frankly use and
I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have it.… It’s
very bad for our workers and it’s unfair for our workers. And we
should end it.

Either Trump doesn’t remember he said this or he doesn’t care.
Very likely Trump has forgotten what the H-1B program is. “I have
many H-1B visas on my properties,” Trump told the _Post_. No, he
doesn’t. Trump has many holders
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H-2A visas, which are for lower-wage agricultural workers, and of H-2B
visas, which are for lower-wage seasonal workers (typically landscape
workers). Even more than last time, Trump administration policy on
H-1B visas will have to be settled by others because, as I argued
last month
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Trump is a weak leader too ignorant and now too impaired cognitively
to provide much direction. These others—Trump’s underlings—will
duke it out, but in the end they’ll likely favor the H-1B program
because pleasing big business is what Republicans do.

Neither side of this donnybrook came with clean hands. It began after
Trump chose an Indian immigrant and venture capitalist named Sriram
Krishnan to be senior White House policy adviser on artificial
intelligence. (Now a United States citizen, Krishnan arrived not on an
H-1B visa but an L-1 visa, which allows American companies to transfer
employees to the United States from overseas.) The appointment
prompted a vicious attack on Krishnan by Loomer. Loomer is
a twice-failed candidate
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Congress from Florida, a 9/11 conspiracist
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self-described “white advocate
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and “proud Islamaphobe
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who shocks even Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene; in September
Greene told CNN
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“I have concerns about her rhetoric and her hateful tone.” But for
some reason Trump is fond of Loomer. Although campaign
aides successfully resisted
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directive that she be given an official role in his reelection effort,
Loomer traveled
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with Trump.

It became evident in September that the fetid bouquet of Loomer’s
racial prejudices includes a revulsion toward people of Indian
heritage. The evidence was her toxic tweet
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“If @KamalaHarris [[link removed]] wins, the White
House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated
via a call center.” On December 23, Loomer tweeted that Krishnan’s
appointment was “deeply disturbing
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somebody answered, “This nation was built by immigrants,”
Loomer replied:
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country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world
invaders from India” where people are “still shitting in the water
they bathe and drink from.” After more posts along these lines,
Musk wrote [[link removed]] on
Twitter, “Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore.” The next day,
Loomer and 13 other conservatives taking her side lost their
“blue-check” verification badges
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said that Musk, a self-professed “free speech absolutist
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them. “Looks like Elon Musk is going to be silencing me for
supporting original Trump immigration policies,” Loomer posted on X
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Amid all this Sturm und Drang it was easy to overlook that, buried
under Loomer’s racism against Indians, there was a legitimate
disagreement about immigration policy. Krishnan, Loomer pointed out
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(but before Trump named him as White House aide), “Anything to
remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would
be huge.” That was in reply to Musk’s request for suggested
policies for his Department of Government Efficiency (which is really
just a White House commission). Loomer answered Krishnan by saying
that without country caps and other such restrictions
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foreign labor might displace “American STEM students.”
Bannon weighed in
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Loomer’s side by stating on his _War Room_ podcast, “The H-1B
visa program is a total and complete scam from its top to the
bottom.”

Bannon overstates the case, but it’s true that the H-1B program has
been grossly abused to displace domestic tech workers, not because
these workers are inferior but because H-1B workers are cheaper and
easier to control. The most notorious instance occurred in 2014
when Disneyland fired 250 tech workers
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subcontracted their work out to an India-based firm staffed by Indian
guest workers here on H-1B visas. Ten years later, the “outsourcing
loophole” remains unplugged, and in April 2023 the nonprofit
Economic Policy Institute reported
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the top 30 H-1B employers over the previous 15 months laid off 85,000
workers … and hired 34,000 H-1B workers. Staffing agencies have even
been known to place H-1B workers
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the same Labor Department that’s supposed to police this program.

Given all that, corporate testimonials praising the H-1B program
warrant considerable skepticism. Musk said
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skilled guest workers was necessary because the “number of people
who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far
too low.” That’s true up to a point. But trusting Musk to decide
where that point lies would be no less foolhardy than trusting Loomer,
Bannon, or Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who from his White House
perch will try to kill off H-1B.

Loomer and Bannon aren’t the only excitable ones. Musk conducted his
side of the argument with only a smidgen more decorum than Loomer.
“Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,”
Musk answered
[[link removed]] an X post
(not from Loomer) that said H-1Bs shouldn’t exist. “I will go to
war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly
comprehend.” Musk’s DOGE co-chair, Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile,
used the occasion to share a long-festering wound
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his Cincinnati childhood: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen
over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will
not produce the best engineers.” As Dr. Spielvogel says
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the end of _Portnoy’s Complaint_
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“Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”

Perhaps you’re wondering what the last Trump administration did
about H-1B visas. The short answer is, very little, though not for
lack of trying. Initially, Miller and his agency allies tried to deny
H-1B applications en masse, but so many of these denials
were overturned in court
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they gave up and sought to limit the program through regulation
instead
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But the rules weren’t issued until 2020, many of them after Trump
lost the election, and were either vacated by federal judges or
blocked by incoming President Joe Biden. In the end, the number of
H-1B visas issued actually rose
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Trump’s watch until the Covid epidemic drove them down in 2020 and
2021.

Miller will try again in 2025. He can’t have been happy to lose
Round One to Musk. I think it will be difficult for Miller going
forward because Trump is more feeble mentally than four years ago and
more vulnerable financially
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The latter probably explains why Trump so often allows Musk to steal
the spotlight. Because of these frailties, I expect Trump’s second
presidential term to be more oligarchical than the first
[[link removed]]. “I
hope these last few days have taught all of you something,”
Loomer posted
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on X. What they taught me is that the business lobby likely has less
to fear from Trump than it thinks—and the rest of us likely have
more.

_Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The
Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We
Can Do About It._

_The New Republic [[link removed]] was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

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* Elon Musk
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* tech workers
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* Immigration
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* plutocracy
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* Oligarchy
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* Steve Bannon
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