Court Drama

I mean the imperial court

The civil war has started, apparently, but it's all on their side. I mean, they're fighting over who owns Trump, at least initially, between Laura Loomer, the self-described embodiment of MAGA, and Elon Musk, the embodiment of billionaires; who's going to be Trump's "sidepiece" as Loomer startlingly puts it, though I'm not sure she means us to understand the word the way I understand it, or whether she's aware how three months ago some of us thought she was advertising herself as the emperor's sidepiece in the traditional sense, speaking of stage 5 clingers:

No one can keep former President Donald Trump away from Laura Loomer.

Throughout his third presidential campaign, aides and advisers have done their best to shield him from Loomer, a far-right social media influencer, and similar figures who stroke his ego and stoke his basest political instincts. (NBC News, September 13)

Indeed, I hear, he’s moved right in to Mar a Lago, taking up a cottage on the property that rents for $2000 a night. Money is always welcome, billionaire to billionaire, sorry, Laura.

Now it turns out there's an ideological component to the conflict, over the question of immigration. This goes back to last Sunday (as I learn from Heather Cox Richardson), when Trump named a member of the Musk-Andreesen-Ackman circle, Sriram Krishnan, as a senior White House adviser on artificial intelligence, and Loomer issued an angry protest the next day. Krishnan was born in India himself, and has advocated making it easier for US companies (thinking especially of the tech industry) to hire foreign workers on H-1B visas. This caused an explosion of rage in the nativist caucus of the Republican party—the part where Loomer and Stephen Bannon live—who wanted to know why foreigners were being preferred over the American-born:

Loomer made a series of racist posts, claiming among other things that: "Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India." She said, "It's not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H-1B visas. Not an extension."

Musk gets pretty offensive in return, suggesting that Americans are genetically unsuited to the kind of work his and other Big Tech companies need them to do:

"HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America. This is not about handing out opportunities from some magical hat. You don’t get it. This is blindingly obvious when looking at NBA teams, as the physical differences are so obvious to see," Musk wrote.

"However, the MENTAL differences between humans are FAR bigger than the physical differences!!"

In fact he seems to think the Big Tech boom is entirely owed to people on H-1Bs making up for Americans' incapacity:

That, strictly speaking, is a lie: Musk came to the US on an exchange student visa, the terms of which he violated by not going to school but working illegally instead, founding the first of his companies:

The Post also alleges that in 1996, investors made a funding agreement contingent on Musk obtaining permission to work in the U.S. within 45 days. Zip2 board member Derek Proudian told the newspaper that Musk's immigration status was "not what it should be."

And Musk could arguably be deported by a Trump administration, under Stephen Miller's plan to strip US citizenship from naturalized immigrants who commit crimes, as of course could Melania Trump. (Musk claims he was allowed to work under the terms of a J-1 Exchange Visitor visa and then "transitioned" to H-1B, but that's clearly false; work under the terms of the J-1 is supposed to be monitored by the institution sponsoring you, in his case Stanford University, which couldn’t have been monitoring him since he dropped out of before he started working—and to "transition" to H-1B status, he would have been required to spend two years back home in South Africa, unless he could prove he was in danger of persecution there or got a waiver from a federal agency interested in his project, which was hardly likely in the case of Zip2, a kind of stupid product of the early dotcom era that fulfilled its real purpose by getting bought in 1999, at the age of four, by Compaq Computer, as an enhancement for their Alta Vista websearch program, which in turn sold out to Yahoo in 2003.) I'm not saying it's going to happen to Musk, but it should if it happens to anybody else.

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The H-1B is clearly a different issue: On the Bannon-Loomer side, it's a stalking horse for the project of cutting down legal immigration, with which Bannon has been obsessed for years:

“Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.”

Bannon asked repeatedly, “Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?”

“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?”

I don't think they've given up on that.

On the Musk-Ramaswamy side, it's a matter of what they want the foreign workers for: if it's because they can pay them less, hold them hostage by threatening to have them deported if they look for a better job, force them to work 80-hour weeks without overtime, that certainly shouldn't be happening. If they really can't find qualified Americans, then you can't blame them, thought it would be really nice to stop calling them "retarded". If they really can't get engineering degrees, that's a systemic failure and something ought to be done about it. DEI for the white students as well as the Black and Indigenous. The thing you absolutely shouldn't do is dismantle the Department of Education, as Republicans advocate, or turn it over to a professional wrestling magnate who knows nothing about education, as Trump proposes.

As to the split itself in the Trump movement, between the OG Trumper crazies like Bannon who brung him to the dance in 2015 and the techbro New Trumpies (the ones who keep showing up at Mar-a-Lago with million-dollar tributes to the Inauguration Committee) of whom Musk seems to be the $250-million leader, Martin Longman has come up with a weirdly compelling analogy to the Nationalsozialische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei government in the months immediately after Hitler's naming as German Chancellor by the coalition of conservative parties plus the NSDAP that used him to form a majority after the first of two general elections in 1933, and the conflicts within Hitler's own movement.

On one side was Hitler's own power base, the hoodlums of Ernst Röhm's SA (Sturmabteilung), and their ideological underpinning from the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, the leftists who put the "sozialist" in "Nationalsozialist" together with the brutal antisemitism of the party's founding (Hitler was against calling it "socialist" but others insisted it was needed to attract working class votes). On the other side was the haute bourgeoisie of Germany's great industrialists, attracted by the ideas Benito Mussolini had been implementing in Italy throughout the 1920s for defeating leftism.

The sympathies of President von Hindenburg, the octogenarian Franco-Prussian war hero serving as head of state in charge of naming the head of government, were decidedly not with the hoodlums, and he had some doubts about selecting Hitler:

Hitler renounced Otto Strasser causing him to leave the party and set up a rival organization. But reassurance for Hindenburg also came from a November 19, 1932 letter known as the Industrielleneingabe, or Industrial Petition. Signed by business and banking titans like Erwin Merck, Hjalmar Schacht and Kurt Baron von Schröder, it requested that Hindenburg put Hitler in charge. This was ultimately successful, but it didn’t alleviate Hindenburg’s concerns. Throughout 1933 and into 1934, the SA continued to act in a lawless manner and aspired to take control of the armed services, which they outnumbered. Hindenburg eventually threatened Hitler with a military coup if he couldn’t get them under control.

It was at this point that Hitler acted in what is now called the Night of the Long Knives. He arrested and murdered Röhm, Gregor Strasser, and many of their allies, bringing the SA firmly under the control of the military and wiping out the left-wing populist wing of the Nazi Party for good.

You see the parallels: the "populist" strain of Trumpism, ideologically directed by Bannon (but also inside the Republican establishment with figures like Hawley and Cruz), and supported by paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, corresponds to the "leftist" side of the Nazi supporters (spoiler: they're not exactly the same: the Nazi leftists were real workers, while Trump's thugs are white conservatives who think of themselves as working class because they're embarrassed by their lack of education and they think this makes them sound better); while the billionaire strain dominated by Musk corresponds to the great German financiers of the interwar period who pushed themselves into the new industries such as pharmaceuticals and automobile manufacture in this new alignment, seeing the possibility of absolute rule for themselves.

Not that you should expect Trump to order Bannon and Hawley and Cruz to be rubbed out in a Night of the Long Knives any time in the next year—I think you can count on him to side with the billionaires on pretty much every substantive issue, while offering performative gestures of support to the populists, more or less the way he did in the previous term, with his stupid Day One pretense at keeping his promise to "ban all Muslims from entering this country, until we find out just what in the hell is going on." He was never going to threaten the Saudi and Emirati and Qatari royals, though they were definitely Muslims occasionally entering this country (often to stay in one of his hotels); he chose a playdate with them, sword dance and mysterious orb and all, for his first official foreign trip. The ban itself was aimed only at poor people.

In the same way, the Day One attacks he mounts on immigrants won't affect Musk's or his own employees, whatever Bannon and Loomer may call for. He won't limit himself to "illegals"—he will unquestionably call for revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians affected by the 2010 earthquake ("They're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!") and some other groups, as he did in 2017 and 2018, only to be stopped by a series of court cases (while the Biden administration restored the TPS anyway), which he ultimately lost (in 2024!). Work on the Trump tax cut, in contrast, proceeded expeditiously, and that will happen again in 2025.

The most interesting thing about the comparison is really the illustration it gives of fascism as a way of getting the humble to vote against their own interests, through what Mussolini called "corporatism": "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power." This is often misunderstood as describing an interdependence between the state and the business corporation, but what Mussolini understood by "corporate" referred to all the sectors of society, industrial labor, agricultural labor, the military, the churches, the aristocracy, the academy, and the capitalists, which could be organized into "corporate groups" participating in governance, in a peaceful alternative to the class struggle described by Marx as inevitable.

It doesn't lead, in Italy and Germany then, in Russia now, to joint control between the state and the "corporations", but to totalitarianism; at the same time, the capitalists get a very good deal in terms of freedom to exploit, quietly accommodated while workers are distracted from their exploitation with some new hatred (immigrants or Jews) and detached them from their corporate representation ("First they came for the trade unions"). This is the process masked by the exciting drama of ladies-in-waiting and gentlemen of the bedchamber at the emperor's court.