We’re seeing a range of headlines today about the “MAGA civil war” centered on immigration policy. Is the point to put America to work for Americans (MAGA-coded “real Americans,” of course)? Or is it to open the flood gates for engineers from Bangalore and Taiwan to achieve maximum efficiency and the global dominance of Silicon Valley? Vivek Ramaswamy baldly went there with a long post arguing that you simply can’t staff Silicon Valley with native-born Americans because the country is mired in a “culture of mediocrity.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he continued. It’s worth reading because it distills a specific viewpoint, at least parts of which many people agree with and which has powerful backers in Silicon Valley.
But let me suggest that a “MAGA civil war” isn’t the right frame to understand any of this. MAGA of the 2024-25 era is more like an electoral machine built around Donald Trump. Itr runs very well. Who gets to run it and who does it work for? Good white folk from Middle America or the best and the brightest from South Asia? MAGA never really had core policies. It had impulses. A huge amount of canonical Trumpism, as it was articulated during the Biden years, was a raft of policies and goals that were little more than payback over the Mueller probe. With Trump now tired and on the way out, there’s an increasing free-for-all over who gets the keys. Musk? Bannon? Ramaswamy? The Project 2025 Heritage Crowd? JD Vance and Josh Hawley and anti-cat ladyism?
It’s of course true that every winning presidential campaign must assemble a coalition of interests to achieve victory. Those different factions vie for ascendency when it comes to divvying up the policy and personnel spoils. But this is different. It’s the flip side of Trump’s deep-seated and extreme transactionalism. Trump signed on lots of different groups more or less indifferent to the policy payoffs and promises he was handing out. Those groups could see the potential payoff of cutting deals with a guy who had a good shot of winning the presidency and didn’t really care about what his policies would be once he won.
He’s not talked about much in the current moment because immigration isn’t his thing. But consider Robert Kennedy Jr. Trump has handed over to him a huge chunk of the federal government, though certainly he’ll have minders with him at HHS. Is he MAGA? Kennedy and the made-to-order MAHA sidecar were grafted on to the movement in the last months of the final stretch of the campaign for narrowly electoral reasons. Silicon Valley, embodied by Musk, Thiel and the rest, really isn’t that different. Their agenda, while odious, is quite different from Trump’s. You see that in the whole DOGE clownshow. As I noted above, Trump’s whole interest in rooting out the Deep State is grounded on anger over the Mueller probe and its various successors, with additional buy-in and leg work from the older Norquistian part of the GOP. Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE is a very different kind of tech-libertarian reboot, which includes deeply unpopular things like wholesale cuts to social insurance programs which Trump has always been shrewd enough to avoid.
This is less a “civil war” than Bannon and Co. playing the role of Twitter’s then-employees the day after Musk finalized his purchase of the company. My point here isn’t to argue that each group is radically different or that the newcomers are “not that bad.” It’s more that what we’re seeing here is more the fallout of the fact that lots of players saw Trump as a vehicle that stood a good shot at winning the presidency, was old and increasingly worn out and wasn’t particularly invested in what happened once he was in the White House other than not going to jail and lording it over his foes. That leaves lots of openings for people who see the opportunity and take a ride in the car with the aim of making their way to the drivers’ seat because they know Trump is old, distracted and mostly doesn’t care. You could say it’s a Silicon Valley hostile takeover of MAGA. But I’m not even sure it’s hostile. There’s little sign Trump cares. He’s already gotten what he wants.
