MAGA civil war sparks fears of chaotic Trump White House

WASHINGTON: With Donald Trump´s allies in open warfare ahead of his inauguration, analysts see the latest hostilities between his billionaire backers and working-class base as a preview of tensions that threaten to shatter his fragile coalition.

The furor over whether to welcome skilled foreign workers has exposed deep fault lines between the hardcore immigration hawks who have been with Trump from the start and the “tech bros” who spent a fortune getting the Republican re-elected.

Threatening to grow into an irreparable schism, the row has prompted leading lights in Trump´s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) crusade to highlight what they see as the absurdity of a supposedly populist movement where the mega-rich call the shots.

“I think this most recent war of words between traditional MAGA and big-tech MAGA was an opening salvo in a long-running battle over the future of the MAGA movement,” political analyst Flavio Hickel told AFP.

Leading the Silicon Valley faction is Elon Musk, the South African-born SpaceX and Tesla boss, who shelled out at least $250 million to bankroll the Trump campaign, even as the candidate pushed scare stories about a migrant-led crime wave that never was.

Musk´s money was a boon, but the world´s richest man found himself a target of MAGA after supporting visas for skilled foreigners, apparently unaware that his new allies´ anti-immigrant animus extends to his own employment practices.

Hickel characterized Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and several other tech tycoons Trump has tapped in advisory roles as “ideologically libertarian” and favoring traditional conservative priorities like balanced budgets and expansive legal immigration.

“Traditional MAGA seems to care little about the budget and found Trump´s nativism to be the most appealing feature of his candidacies,” the politics professor, who teaches at Maryland liberal arts school Washington College said.