An online clash broke out between some of Donald Trump's most fervent supporters over an immigrant program long used by Silicon Valley tech companies, and a pair of analysts explained how "preexisting tensions" could make the MAGA coalition untenable.
Trump named Indian-born tech entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan as his senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence, and far-right activist Laura Loomer complained that his support for removing some caps on visas for skilled foreign workers would be “in direct opposition” to the president-elect's agenda – but Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and other business allies defended H-1B visas as necessary.
"If you think about Vivek Ramaswamy's actual history and longer trajectory, he is very transactional," political analyst Leah Wright Rigueur told CNN. "He is relatively new to the conservative movement and certainly new to the MAGA movement. That was Laura Loomer's point [as well as] several other of the kind of high-profile MAGA people who jumped into this conversation."
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"But I would also point out that this larger conversation, as our other panelists have have pointed out already, but as this larger conversation comes to a head, it does highlight tensions, preexisting tensions that have come to the fore, but that were hidden for a long time as people rallied around Donald Trump to elect him to office," added Rigueur, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "Perhaps more importantly, a lot of businesses have actually, this is why they are putting their hat in with Donald Trump, because they want to offset this kind of anti-immigration, pro-business bent on the base, and that's where the tensions really arise from."
CNN political commentator Jamal Simmons agreed, saying that Trump's right-wing base and his corporate allies have a mutual mistrust for one another, and their goals are often incompatible.
"We are going to see a lot of strange bedfellows, because what's happening is the MAGA coalition is built on a fault line of anxiety, and you've got cultural anxiety on one side and economic anxiety on the other side," said Simmons, who served two years ago as communications director for vice president Kamala Harris. "The problem that the two of those things are grating against each other. They cut against each other, so to deal with the cultural anxiety, it's really about white, traditional, white, Christian, heterosexual male culture being able to kind of be dominant in America."
"On the other hand, in the economic side, you've got to have more diversity," Simmons added. "You've got to have more immigration, you've got to go out and recruit engineers from different places. because the truth is, we do need more engineers as global competition for engineers is taking place in the country. So if we don't have more talent in the United States and get the talent, more skills, and have that talent come from more communities, it's going to be pretty tough for America to compete on the global scale. So we've got to solve that, but it cuts right against that traditional cultural anxiety that a lot of the folks who joined up with the MAGA coalition are feeling, and it's hard to reconcile those two things."