MSNBC anchor Ayman Mohyeldin led a panel discussion on Friday about the “MAGA civil war” brewing on X between anti-immigrant hardliners and big tech billionaires who praise the H-1B visa program, which brings high-skilled workers into the country.
Mohyeldin began by introducing his panel of “Eugene Daniels, MSNBC political contributor and coauthor of Politico’s Playbook a must-read in Washington. Also with us, Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, and Molly Jong-fast, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and MSNBC political analyst” and eventually asked Wilson for his take:
Rick, that did not take long.
Rick, that did not take long. And I’d love to start with you and get your reaction to this Christmas immigration MAGA civil war that is playing out. We all could see it coming. Over the last several months and now it has fully exploded into the wide open on X nonetheless.
It’s an inevitability that the hyper-populist, non-college-educated part of Trump’s base, which is the plurality at the minimum, a majority in certain arguments, were always going to be preconditioned to believe that the word immigration or the word visa always in their minds means ‘brown people bad,’” Wilson began, adding:
And so they have this belief that that, you know, the guy with the GED and his fake Oakley sunglasses, his goatee and his pickup truck, you know, the universal Twitter bro that you see in every avatar on Twitter, that guy’s thinking of, I could have been the senior software designer at Google if only it weren’t for DEI or immigration. It’s absurd. But now you see these people that rely on that as a core part of their business, just like Donald Trump does.
Also, by the way, for service staff at Mar-a-Lago and other resorts. You see this conflict. It’s going to eventually be that the hyper populists, they don’t really care about the more sophisticated arguments about H-1B or one of the visas they carry around people, that that’s their whole that’s their whole driving conditioning they’ve had for bought from Fox for years
Mohyeldin then turned to Jong-Fast, asking, “And it’s so rich, Molly, when you see Elon Musk was, you know, pretended to be a free speech warrior or free speech absolutist, barely tolerating the criticism of Laura Loomer. I mean, someone, not someone who has a lot of respect, not somebody who I think everyone looks at and says, that is a, you know, a champion of free speech herself. But here she is, you know, taking aim at Elon Musk, who has now stripped her of her highly coveted verification badge, I guess.”
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think any of this should come as a huge surprise, but I think it’s worth remembering that Elon Musk put 200-plus million dollars into this campaign. And I think he thought, as a lot of billionaires did, that Trump would be transactional and that they could give him money and get him to do what they wanted,” Jong-fast replied, adding:
Now what they want is skilled workers for their companies, Right? And you’ll see, I mean, Tesla is like the third biggest user of H-1b visas. And there is a reason for that. They need the workers. So here’s the question now.
Donald Trump has a problem, right? He has a base that has elected him on, quote unquote, mass deportation. Now, they had it on signs and then he has, you know, billionaires who paid for this campaign who want workers. And I think this is going to come to a head pretty quickly.
