Donald Trump's top issue next year is fixing immigration, and an MSNBC political panel thinks he set up his supporters for an internal civil war over it.
Speaking to Ayman Mohyeldin, who is filling in for Nicolle Wallace, Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson said Trump has spent the past decade blaming immigrants for all that ails them. Meanwhile, Trump has welcomed the billionaire class, in stark contrast to the MAGA ideology.
It presented itself in a very public fight between MAGA darling Laura Loomer and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has been on Trump's side for the past several months. Musk's Tesla company is the third largest user of H-1B visas, which allow immigrants to work in the United States.
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This week, Musk and his ally Vivek Ramaswamy have expressed support for prioritizing skilled immigrants over American workers in online discussions. Musk even agreed with a user's controversial comment on his platform, which suggested — using offensive language — that Americans might lack the qualifications for certain skilled jobs.
Ramaswamy went so far as to claim that Americans are lazy and care more about watching "Friends" and going to the mall. He complained Thursday that American culture prizes jocks over nerds in a world he said was run by the latter.
Mohyeldin said everyone saw the clash coming, but it happened quickly.
"It is an inevitability the non-college educated base, which is the majority, were always going to be preconditioned to believe that the word immigrant or visa means brown people bad," Wilson said.
Many MAGA supporters believe they could have been millionaires working as software designers at Google if it weren't for immigrants or DEI, he said.
"You see this conflict. It's going to be the hyper-populists," Wilson continued. "They don't care about the more sophisticated arguments about the visas. They care, brown people bad. That's the driving conditioning they have had from Fox for years."
Writer and commentator Molly Jong-Fast agreed, saying Musk invested over $200 million in electing Trump and thought he'd gain something from it.
"I think he thought, as a lot of billionaires thought, it would be transactional, and they could give him money and get what they wanted," she explained. "What they want is skilled workers for their companies."
Skilled American labor crushed under the weight of college debt won't work for the bottom-dollar salaries in jobs that require more than 40 hours a week.
"Donald Trump has a problem," Jong-Fast continued. "He has a base that has elected him on 'mass deportation now.' They had it on signs. Then he has billionaires who paid for this campaign and who want workers. I think this is going to come to a head pretty quickly."
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