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If there were any doubts that Donald Trump would begin his second term with deep fractures in his movement, they were erased last week when Steve Bannon called Elon Musk “a truly evil person” with the “maturity of a child” and vowed to “get Elon Musk kicked out” by Inauguration Day.
At the beginning of January, Bannon also issued a warning to Musk: that he, a “convert” to the MAGA movement, needed to “sit in the back and study for years” instead of taking charge—or else “we’re going to rip your face off.”
As of yet, Musk has not responded. But Musk is nothing if not combative, and Bannon will surely keep this up. Because the tensions within the MAGA world are both petty and existential.
Bannon is almost certainly smarting from Musk’s rise in popularity with his former boss. But much more seriously, Bannon has worked very hard to shape the framework for MAGA populism for about a decade, and if the way he talks on his show is any indication, he feels that those long years of diligence were about to pay off, that he was on the brink of actually realizing his nationalist populist vision. Then Musk came along and, almost overnight, X-posted his way into a kind of co-president position. A tech billionaire, Musk is antithetical to Bannon’s crusade against the elite; Bannon must see him as a dire threat to his most radical populist ideas.
The cracks between the tech broligarchs who are now flocking around Trump and the populist MAGA movement that launched him began to reveal themselves in late December when the provocateur Laura Loomer started attacking the H-1B visa, which facilitates the staffing of a significant portion of the tech industry.
Musk, who himself once held an H-1B visa, and who has hired H-1B workers for his company Tesla, has argued that the U.S. needs immigrants from India, China, and other countries for continued excellence in the tech sector. (Musk also replied to a post on X that claimed that his position on American workers was “you guys are retarded” with the comment “That pretty much sums it up.”) Loomer went on Bannon’s show, War Room, and called Musk a “welfare queen” for benefiting personally from the visa; Bannon called Musk “sociopathic” and said he owed the U.S. “reparations” for the jobs he gave to non-Americans.
There’s really no way to split the difference here: The Musk camp sees the incoming president as an ally in eliminating burdensome regulations in pursuit of technology-boosted greatness and riches. The Bannon camp sees the incoming president as the path to building a long-dreamed-of new political order. But those visions are inherently contradictory: Bannon’s espoused desire to eliminate the influence of wealthy “elites” on the GOP naturally includes the influence of Musk and his cohort—or the “technofeudalists,” as Bannon calls them.
Bannon’s comments about Musk being “evil” were published on Jan. 8 by Corriere della Sera, the most widely read newspaper in Italy. “Stopping him has become a personal issue for me,” Bannon told the paper. “Before, since he’s put in so much money, I was prepared to tolerate it. Not anymore.”
Bannon’s entire political philosophy is based on extreme isolationist ideas. He has long argued that immigrants make it harder for Americans to get jobs; Musk, who is happy to make inflammatory or outright racist comments about migrants crossing the Mexican border or to stir up fears about Arab communities in the U.K., still supports skilled immigration for the tech sector. Bannon often portrays China as America’s greatest enemy; Musk has significant business ties to China and stays conspicuously silent about its government. With the confidence that might naturally come from being the richest man on Earth, Musk appears to believe he can fix the country by slashing things he doesn’t like (regulations, budgets, jobs); Bannon, meanwhile, has said he wants to raise taxes on the wealthy while shutting out all foreign influence—which necessarily includes Musk. Musk dreams of a science fiction future; Bannon, a mythic past.
Right now, Musk may look to have the upper hand in the MAGA world: Through his vast fortune, he has earned Trump’s ear. He will take a place of prominence at Trump’s inauguration and has already thrown his weight around, having almost single-handedly killed a federal funding deal in December; he has also claimed White House complex office space. But Bannon, a long-game man, has proven himself steadier than Musk. He is more committed to a single ideology, and he more closely represents the worldview of Trump’s die-hard MAGA supporters. Musk, with his control of one of the largest social media platforms, may have a reach on an entirely different scale, but he can’t touch Bannon when it comes to articulating grievances.
“His only goal is to become a trillionaire,” Bannon said of Musk in the interview with Corriere della Sera. “He will do anything to make sure that every company he owns is protected or has a better deal or makes more money. The aggregation of wealth and, through wealth, power: that is his goal. American workers will not tolerate it.”
And in a kind of perverse twist, Bannon, who relies on dehumanizing immigrants for his politics but simultaneously believes his nationalist movement to be a coalition-builder across racial demographics, has been able to level charges of racism against his opponent.
“Seventy-six percent of engineers in Silicon Valley are not Americans,” Bannon said. “These are the best jobs, and Blacks and Hispanics don’t have access to them.”
“He should go back to South Africa,” he added. “Why do we have white South Africans, the most racist people in the world, commenting on everything that happens in the United States?”
On the social media platform Gettr, he warned that “If the Masses will Not Shower Him with Adoration, Elon will Suppress Their Voices on Twitter Thru a CCP Inspired Social Credit Score…” Later, he said that someone needed to “do a ‘wellness check’ on this toddler.” (This was in response to Musk telling someone who criticized his support for the visa to “FUCK YOURSELF in the face.”) When Musk criticized the right-wing British conservative Nigel Farage over a minor squabble, Bannon crowed at a poll showing Farage’s party doing well, writing “Suck on That Elon.”
On Jan. 8 on War Room, he had a guest on to complain that X had become “Orwellian”; that Tesla sourced its cobalt and nickel from a mine known for human rights abuses; and that Musk’s defense of the H-1B visa amounted to “abandoning” young Americans. “We’re not going to take the temperature down,” Bannon said on a separate show.
And on Tuesday, Bannon told Politico that it was natural that Musk, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get elected, would have “influence.” But he argued that that was different, somehow, from “power”—something he said Musk didn’t have much of. “He doesn’t have the ability to actually make decisions and inform those decisions and drive those decisions,” he told Politico.
In reality, the two camps may have just enough in common when it comes to power to keep each other around. And who knows? Maybe they’ll unite in some way. Bannon has said he appreciates Musk’s shared love for promoting far-right movements in Europe, for example. And both speak of the importance of “traditional” Western values as the bedrock of American society.
But Bannon is a committed antiestablishment man and a true believer in his cause. So long as Musk and the tech CEOs continue to hover around the president, Bannon will rail on them, acting as the GOP’s gadfly, and forcing them to confront the contradictions in Trump’s party.
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