'I regret my vote for Trump': The MAGA civil war gets ugly

"Take a step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face," Elon Musk tweeted at Trump supporters last night as all hell broke loose over immigration.

Laura Loomer + Elon Musk

Greetings, friends. What day is it? Who cares. I write from the liminal abyss between Christmas and NYE, where I’m drifting aimlessly from meal to Cajun meal at my parents’ house in South Louisiana and reveling in the peaceful boredom and 70-degree days down here. Two nights ago I made the mistake of suggesting the three of us watch Anora together, having missed the “graphic nudity” and “strong sexual content” warnings about the film. The first 45 minutes were essentially one extremely long porn clip, which I watched on a reclining chair in between my 70-year-old mom and dad, uncomfortably rambling about how the movie got 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and surely was going to get to the plot at some point. As MAGA influencers like to say, do your own research.

Speaking of MAGA, a spectacular civil war has broken out in the past few days between Trump loyalists and the billionaire tech bros that bought the election for him, which has culminated in Elon Musk calling some Trump supporters “contemptible fools” and telling them to go “fuck [themselves] in the face” before Trump has even taken office. The fight is over immigration—specifically, whether Trump’s administration should welcome the kinds of highly-skilled immigrant tech workers that men like Elon Musk rely on for labor, or whether Trump’s “America First” hardline anti-immigration stance is supposed to exclude all immigrant workers so that Americans can take those jobs for themselves. MAGA pundit Laura Loomer appears to have started the fight by tearing into Musk over his support for immigrants (like himself) studying here in working in American tech jobs, and it escalated into a broader attack on Elon’s influence in MAGA world.

Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of Trump’s made-up DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), squared up for battle and essentially took the stance that American workers are useless compared to the kinds of highly-skilled, highly-motivated workers with H1-B visas they’re importing from India and elsewhere.

“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture,” Ramaswamy wrote on X. “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer).”

Elon then responded “exactly” to a post saying American workers are too “r*tarded” to do the jobs he’s been hiring immigrants for. This kicked over a hornet’s nest of MAGA rage: Steve Bannon called Musk a globalist who “would take a check from Adolf Hitler himself;” Loomer quoted a Musk tweet saying she finally understands Luigi Mangione. Even Nikki Haley took sides against Musk: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” she wrote on X. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

The rift was apparently upsetting to some of Trump’s voters, who didn’t realize that MAGA’s racism and xenophobia also extended to legal immigrants and not just the Central American ones they openly hate. (Nevermind Trump and J.D. Vance repeatedly attacking legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield by literally claiming they eat people’s pets.)

By last night, Musk was in full meltdown mode. His MAGA critics claim that he’s been stripping them of their blue checks and subscribers and limiting the reach of their posts, despite supposedly having bought Twitter in order to protect that kind of “free speech” in America, and then he straight-up told MAGA to go fuck themselves.

Trump has been oddly quiet through this fiasco, but he finally weighed in today via a comment to Murdoch’s NY Post: "I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” he was quoted as saying. “I've been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It's a great program.” (Trump is apparently wrong about the kinds of visas his own workers have, per a lot of people online who know more about immigration policy than I do.)

The irony of this whole situation is that Musk, while calling Trump’s supporters too racist for him and apparently silencing some of MAGA’s loudest bigots, wrote an op-ed today in Germany’s newspaper today making the case for the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is packed with neo-Nazis. Musk also deliberately allowed white supremacists to flourish on his platform and regularly interacts with and boosts Nazi propaganda. He is, by all measures, a neo-Nazi; he’s simply sticking his neck out to protect the specific kinds of immigrant workers that he personally needs to boost his bottom line.

I will admit to feeling a tingle of satisfaction watching the tech billionaires and the MAGA assholes eat each other’s faces—and watching Elon’s brief fan base on his own platform turn against him so hard—before Trump has even been sworn in. But then again, none of us can really win in a war over exactly what kinds of racists Republicans want each other to be, considering these people are actually going to be running the country by the end of next month.