Fractures are already showing in the MAGA coalition,
and they haven’t even taken power yet.

When a party out of power suddenly finds itself on the verge of taking control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you’d expect to find them coasting on a wave of good feeling. Victory salves all wounds, so everybody should be ready to dance with everybody else at the inaugural balls.

Strangely, though, MAGAWorld is full of conflict these days. One Trump-supporting fascist (Steve Bannon) is calling another Trump-supporting fascist (Elon Musk) a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services. And American workers, says Vivek Ramaswamy, can’t compete with immigrants because they suffer from our “culture”, which venerates mediocrity over excellence.

But wait: Isn’t the whole point of Trumpism that “real” (i.e. White Christian) Americans are victims of the liberal Deep State that wants to “replace” them with brown-skinned Third Worlders? What’s going on?

First skirmish: Foreign investment. Trump owes his election to two groups whose interests don’t match up: White working class voters and ultra-rich technology barons like Elon Musk. During the campaign, Trump could keep his plans vague enough that both were satisfied, and many low-wage workers could imagine that the richest man in the world was their friend.

But now that the election is over, the question keeps coming up: Who’s the real president, Trump or Elon? At first I interpreted such comments as Democratic trolling, trying to stir up trouble in MAGAWorld by taking advantage of Trump’s ego. (I remember in his first term how similar questions about Mike Pence riled him. Speculation at the time was that Trump would bask in the glory of the presidency, leaving Pence to do the actual work of governing.)

But more and more, there seems to be something to the murmurs. The move to reject a compromise and risk a government shutdown last week started with Musk, and Trump eventually got on board. Musk was the leader and Trump the follower.

Support for the stopgap spending bill then collapsed, forcing [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and his leadership team to scramble to find an alternative path forward. As they did, Musk celebrated, proclaiming that “the voice of the people has triumphed”.

It may be more accurate, however, to say that it was Musk’s voice that triumphed.

In the end, Congress passed a continuing resolution that still included the most important extras Democrats wanted: rebuilding the Key Bridge in Baltimore and disaster relief. And it kept government spending at basically the levels set before Republicans took control of the House two years ago.

Trump did not get the extra he wanted: suspending or eliminating the debt limit. But Musk did get what he wanted: The original proposal included an “outbound investment” provision limiting how American companies could invest in China.

We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.

Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.

One corporation that would be affected by this is Musk’s Tesla.

Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.

Lo and behold: The outbound investment provision vanished from the final version of the continuing resolution. In other words, Republicans in Congress spent their negotiating chips getting what Musk wanted, not what Trump wanted.

Second skirmish: H-1B visas. A second conflict is still playing out: One of the most important issues for the MAGA base is immigration, and in particular protecting the jobs of American citizens from immigrant competition. “They’re taking American jobs” is one of the most effective attacks on immigrants at all levels, even the ones working jobs hardly any Americans want, like picking crops by hand or watching rich people’s kids for practically no pay.

However, American corporations have a different agenda: They want to hire the best people in the world and pay them as little as possible. This is not new. America has been draining the brains of the world at least since the 1930s, when Jews and other anti-fascists escaped from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We may sympathize with the American physicists who suddenly had to compete with the likes of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, or American actresses who lost roles to Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, but in retrospect it’s hard to feel bad about letting those people into our country.

Similarly today, the US tech industry employs foreign-born workers in jobs many Americans would undoubtedly like to have. The legal vehicle that allows this is the H-1B visa. Employers can sponsor foreign nationals with at least a bachelors degree to apply for H-1B visas that allow them to live and work in the US for three years, with a possible renewal to six years. Currently, 85,000 such visas can be issued each year. 84% of them go to people from India or China. Maybe a handful of those immigrants really are exceptional Einstein-like talents we’d be foolish to turn away, but probably not all 85,000 of them.

The employer has to affirm that the worker will be appropriately paid and that his or her (mostly his) employment won’t negatively impact similar American workers. In practice, though, these provisions are hard to monitor or enforce. Critics charge that H-1B workers are easily abused, because (if no other employers are waiting in the wings) the employer can expel a worker from the US just by withdrawing sponsorship. So H-1B workers can become cheap-but-highly-trained labor that corporations may prefer to American workers that the company doesn’t hold as much leverage over.

Obviously, the tech barons want to be free to import as many cheap engineers and programmers as they want, while Americans with comparable credentials want H-1B visas limited or eliminated. This conflict goes to the heart of what “America First” really means: Should we be strengthening Team America by bringing in talent wherever we can find it, or should we be defending the livelihoods of individual Americans? (An analogy to bring this home: Imagine you’re a young outfielder for the New York Mets, and that you’ve been struggling for playing time so you can prove yourself. How do you feel about the team signing Juan Soto? Your team is better, so your odds of going to the World Series have improved. But your individual prospects have taken a hit.) TPM:

The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.

This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.

Nativists like Laura Loomer (who not so long ago was rumored to be having an affair with Trump) found this appointment “deeply disturbing“. Musk and Ramaswamy replied by attacking American workers, with Musk approvingly retweeting a post that described American workers as “retarded”.

Then Musk was attacked back, and responded by taking away privileges on X from people who criticized him. (Remember when Elon was a “free speech absolutist“? It turns out that just applies to Nazis.)

I think Paul Krugman has put his finger on what’s at stake here:

Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.

What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.

An incurable illness that turns billionaires into owls

Obviously there’s a lot to discuss about the 2024 election results. I’ll offer just the following.

None of this is about the merits of either candidate; it’s about the broad dynamics that shaped the outcome. You don’t have to like those dynamics any more than you like any other aspect of reality. But as the saying goes, denial has no survival value, so it’s best to try to be accurate and unsentimental in our understanding of events.

I think it was a terrible mistake for Harris to fuse her campaign with the Cheneys, other neocons, and various state security apparatchiks. But I also think the prevailing Democratic take on this fusion—some version of “Harris’s campaign is a big tent, the fusion demonstrates even Republican loathing of Trump, etc”—is missing a far more important dynamic that has to do with the dramatically diminished influence of establishment institutions.

Whatever you might think about Trump, he is fundamentally a people-powered candidate. He won two bruising Republican primaries and survived everything the former GOP establishment and the Democratic establishment could throw at him—Russiagate, two impeachments, numerous lawsuits, attempts at ballot removal, a never-ending media blitz, and more. He swings Republican primaries with endorsements, even with tweets. He fills stadiums with enthusiastic audiences. What Trump did in 2016 was functionally a hostile takeover of the GOP, and he has dominated the GOP ever since. We can quibble over these observations, but I think they are broadly accurate.

By contrast, I don’t think Harris can be fairly described as a people-powered candidate. She had to drop out of the 2020 primaries before the first contest—a contest the Democratic establishment engineered to produce a Biden victory (the closest comparison to Trump on the Democratic side was Sanders, who the Democratic establishment twice managed to thwart). That same Democratic establishment and its media allies gaslighted the country for four years about how Biden was “sharp as a tack” and how “age is a superpower” and all that—right up until Biden failed to uphold his end of the bargain and undeniably revealed his condition in the July 2024 presidential debate. At that point, the Democratic establishment swapped him out for Harris.

Again, we can quibble about the foregoing, but my main point is that relatively speaking, Trump’s position derives from bottom-up voter enthusiasm, while relatively speaking, Harris’s position derived from top-down party dictates.

To counter Trump’s relatively people-powered position, Harris relentlessly sought (and received) establishment backing (various Harris supporters also pleaded for a George Bush Jr. endorsement, but Bush endorsed no one). It was less that she needed Republican support; the real need was to bolster her base, which was the establishment (ironically her merger with elements of the Republican establishment seems to have translated into no additional support from Republican voters).

So if there’s a lesson to be learned from this election, it isn’t—or isn’t just—that Democrats don’t benefit from merging with Republicans. It’s more that seeking additional support from an increasingly infirm establishment—political, bureaucratic, media, celebrity, whatever—is a losing proposition.

The foregoing tracks with something I’ve long observed about the humans: they have more trouble changing the frequency than they do the volume. That is, when a tactic isn’t working, humans tend to do it harder rather than changing to a different tactic. To use just one example from the election context, when the media’s eight-year-and-running efforts to brand Trump a fascist proved a failure, did they try a different tactic? Or did they just screech “Fascist!” even louder?

(In fairness, the Harris campaign did briefly experiment with what I guess was a different messaging tactic—“Republicans are weird.” That was such a dud, and so inherently contradictory of the previous messaging, that they immediately reverted to the familiar and comfortable “Fascist!” theme. Please note that this isn’t an argument about whether or not Trump is a fascist. It’s an argument that for eight years, the messaging has proven fruitless, and yet Democrats stayed with it, but louder.)

Worse, when the music you’re playing is unappealing to your audience, playing it louder not only won’t solve the problem—it will irritate the people you’re trying to please. That Harris outspent Trump three-to-one would be an example of playing the music louder when the right move was to change the station.

Combine: (1) the human tendency to blame the volume rather than the frequency, with (2) the human tendency to avoid responsibility, and with (3) the human tendency to focus on power within an institution rather than the power of the institution (The Iron Law of Institutions), and even after 2016 and 2024, it’s difficult to see how the claws of the Clintons, the Obamas, the Pelosis, the Clooneys, the Schumers, and whoever else selected Biden and then swapped him for Harris can be removed from the levers of influence.

One more lesson here: it seems bruising primaries produce strong general election candidates—Obama in 2008; Trump in 2016 and 2024. Managed affairs seem to produce weak candidates: Clinton in 2016; Harris in 2024 (I think Biden won in 2020 largely because of Covid, but unfortunately the panjandrums who installed him think he prevailed because of their wisdom, not despite).

Obviously there’s a ton more to be said on the topic of establishment decline, enough to fill a book: 

Last Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians was causing “enormous damage to security in the West Bank.” A week earlier, Ronen Bar, the head of Shabak, the country’s internal-security agency, sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that settler violence leads to “chaos and loss of control; the damage to Israel is indescribable.” Bar added that the Israeli police has been helpless to stop the attacks, if not secretly supportive of them.

Just yesterday, a Turkish American woman was shot dead by the Israeli military while protesting at a West Bank settlement. But most of the West Bank violence is of a different nature, involving assaults by settlers on Palestinian civilians. July and August saw a terrible spate of these incidents.

A group of off-duty reservists from a settlement shot and killed a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem. Settlers attacked Palestinians, foreigners, and Israelis in the village of Kusra; shot a Palestinian and threw stones at a pizzeria in Hawara; burned fields and threw stones in the village of Rujib; attacked Palestinians with batons in the village of Susya; threw stones and burned the car of four Bedouin Israeli women and a baby in the settlement of Givat Ronen; and rampaged through the village of Jit, shooting a Palestinian dead.

These are acts of terror, meant to scare people and wreak havoc. They are not part of any military operation, even though in some cases, IDF soldiers have been present and stood by. And few such incidents tend to capture the attention of the mainstream Israeli news media, let alone the security forces.

The episodes in Jit and Givat Ronen were exceptions. In Jit, where dozens of masked settlers burned cars, vandalized property, and attacked residents, reserve soldiers on the scene did nothing to stop them. But Israeli police and Shabak forces have since arrested four settlers—likely because the White House called for the criminals to be held to account, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, posted on X that he was “appalled” by the settlers’ violence. In Givat Ronen, the four women who accidentally drove into the settlement, only to come under a hail of stones, tear gas, window smashing, and death threats, were from Rahat, a Bedouin village in the south of Israel. Had the women been run-of-the-mill West Bank Palestinians, as the settlers assumed, rather than Israeli citizens, their story might well have gone unreported.

Settler violence against Palestinians is certainly not a new story. When I researched my novel The Hilltop, published in the U.S. in 2014, I heard about and even witnessed such acts: Settlers physically assaulted Palestinians, burned their olive trees, vandalized their property. But the past year has seen a dramatic increase in the number of attacks.

[Read: ‘You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba’]

The chaos of war may be one reason for this. The settlers see the level of aggression that the state is employing against Palestinians in Gaza. Perhaps motivated by their own feelings of humiliation and desire for revenge after the Hamas attack of October 7, they take advantage of the war footing to employ similar force and brutality against Palestinians in the West Bank, knowing that the world’s attention is fixed on other theaters.

But perhaps the more important factor is that the Israeli establishment is supporting settler violence to an entirely new degree. Not only are the IDF or police failing to stop the attacks, but members of the Knesset openly praise and legitimize them. One such politician, Limor Son Har-Melech, suggested that the assault on the Bedouin women was justified because it “could have been a case of espionage.” Netanyahu’s right-wing minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, presides over the national police force and is particularly supportive of the settler movement. His subordinates seem to understand, even when not getting direct instructions, that they are not to stand in the way of rampaging settlers. The head of Shabak intimated as much in his letter—and Ben-Gvir has since called for his dismissal.

Foreign governments, amazingly, have been the ones to step into this vacuum of law enforcement and governance. Since the beginning of the year, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan have placed financial sanctions on individual settlers, as well as particular outposts and right-wing organizations. Such penalties aren’t game changers, but they do hamper the ability of those sanctioned to carry on their regular activities.

Adam Tsachi is a film scholar from the settlement of Tekoa whom I befriended during my Hilltop research. I asked him via WhatsApp what he made of the recent wave of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. He responded:

I deeply oppose this behavior and I can say that the absolute majority of settlers I know—and I know many—are opposed and shocked by it very much. The attackers are a violent handful who do not represent in any way the majority. And it is terrible. First and foremost, they hurt innocent people. Then they hurt us, the settlement movement, discrediting and demonizing it. Finally, they harm the state of Israel.

He defined stopping the violence as a “critical national mission” and lamented that the government seemed to lack the necessary enforcement mechanisms. And he sent me links to statements by settler leaders and op-eds in right-wing newspapers expressing similar sentiments.

I believe in Tsachi’s honesty, and I believe him when he says that some others in the settlements also think like him. But when I followed the links he sent me, I found the statements and op-eds from settler leaders condemning the violence very general and lacking in context. One portrayed the instigators as “dropout youths from all over the country,” as though these weeds had not grown in their own garden; others claimed that the altercations had been started by Palestinians. I was reminded of the time when an extremist with ties to settlers assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995: No real self-reflection or regret emanated from the movement that had produced that crime. Here again was what felt like a rushed, frightened effort to cut losses after a line had been crossed.

[Read: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Settler violence is an emanation of the doctrine of Jewish superiority, which to my mind is disgusting and shameful, a racist ideology as bad as any in history. The manifestations of this worldview on the ground must be crushed forcefully and quickly. But the Israeli establishment has leaned the other way: The escalation of violence in the West Bank over the past year is the result not of random acts but of a government that has encouraged it and can count the results among its disastrous failures.

I don’t think that Israel’s politics will remain like this forever. This government is an anomaly that will one day come to an end. But settler violence has already inflicted enormous damage: to innocent lives and property, to the future of coexistence, to Israel’s legitimacy and security, and to the quiet endeavor to reach agreements that might end the latest cycle of war. In the absence of principled enforcement, we will need to rely on the continued help of foreign governments, and to strengthen our resistance inside Israel.

Calling itself the world’s first “AI-driven solar company,” Monalee is cutting the soft costs associated with solar by more than 50%, and they’re passing those savings – sometimes thousands of dollars – directly to the homeowner.

A screenshot from the adaptation Citizenk took the time to remind us of an old, yet incredibly ambitious project, Blade Runner: the Aquarel Edition. It's a shot by shot recreation of the movie, but done in watercolors and it is stunning to see.