This week, Donald Trump told MAGA supporters they were dumb. The US president was speaking at the US-Saudi Investment Forum before an audience that included Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the world’s richest man Elon Musk and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.
Last month, chipmaker Nvidia became the world’s first $US5 trillion ($7.75 trillion) company by market capitalisation. Like its Silicon Valley brethren, it relies heavily on bringing skilled foreign workers into the US. In the MAGA universe of “America first”, that’s a thorny issue. American jobs are for Americans.
But Trump knows better, and he made a point of it. If tech companies need to bring in foreigners to make chips and other advanced technologies, they should do so, he said – and the foreigners can teach Americans how to do it.
Donald Trump is increasingly disagreeing with his MAGA base.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Those who railed against skilled migration were great patriots, Trump said, but they just didn’t understand the realities of the industry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My poll numbers just went down – but with smart people, they’ve gone way up.
“You can’t open up a massive computer chip factory for billions and billions of dollars ... and think you’re gonna hire people off an unemployment line to run it. They’re going to have to bring thousands of people with them, and I’m going to welcome those people.”
Trump revelled in his defiance of MAGA orthodoxy. “I may take a little heat – I always take a little heat from my people,” he said. “I love my conservative friends, I love MAGA, but this is MAGA.”
Almost all political leaders disappoint their base. Labor lets down the true believers, the Liberals frustrate their right-wing flank. But the relationship between Trump and MAGA is altogether different. The president likes to say he created the movement, and MAGA is whatever he says it is.
US President Donald Trump said “smart people” would appreciate his drive to bring in foreign workers to make chips.Credit: AP
That symbiosis is being tested. At the pointy end is the Epstein files – now set to be released, to some extent at least, after Trump bowed to reality and signed a bill that will make them public. After resisting for months, the president has returned to the pre-election MAGA orthodoxy: that the Epstein files would primarily embarrass prominent Democrats and members of the so-called East Coast elite.
But there are deeper reasons for the MAGA movement fissures. They span concerns about Trump spending too much time on foreign affairs, his position on China and Chinese students, and divisions over antisemitism, US support for Israel, the cost of living and artificial intelligence.
Trump’s America is also not immune from the global ructions on immigration that are dividing Australia, Britain and Europe. Although the administration rapidly and successfully cracked down on unlawful immigration, it is legal migration – people coming on work visas from India, China, South Korea and elsewhere – that stirred the rift.
It crystallised in a rare combative moment in an interview between Trump and Fox News host Laura Ingraham last week.
Ingraham: “If you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands – or hundreds of thousands – of foreign workers.”
Trump: “I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.”
Ingraham: “We have plenty of talented people.”
Trump: “No, you don’t. You don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn.”
The president was especially aggrieved by an immigration raid on a Hyundai factory in the state of Georgia in September, in which hundreds of skilled workers, mostly South Koreans, were arrested and accused of working unlawfully in the US. Lawyers said the employees had valid visas; some have since returned to the plant.
“They were told to get out, and I said, ‘Stop it, don’t be stupid’, and we worked it out,” Trump told this week’s Saudi conference.
Vice President JD Vance said divisions in the MAGA movement were fine as long as they did not detract from fighting “the enemy”.Credit: AP
That’s all a markedly different message than the one delivered by Vice President JD Vance the next day at an event with right-wing news website Breitbart. In the grand Andrew W. Mellon auditorium on Washington’s Constitution Avenue, Vance departed from Trump’s usual claim that Americans’ present economic woes are entirely caused by his predecessor.
“Let’s be honest, it’s not just Joe Biden ... we had a policy in this country for 40 years of shipping American jobs overseas and hiring foreign workers instead of American workers,” Vance said. “That has caused the economic stagnation of the American middle class.”
While he was emphatic that the Trump administration is on the right path, Vance sounded a different tone to his boss’s regular insistence that prices are down and the economy is humming. “We get it, we hear you,” he told struggling Americans. “We understand that there’s a lot more work to do, and the thing that I’d ask for the American people is a little bit of patience.”
Just as Trump was on stage with the Saudis, a panel on foreign work visas was under way at the Washington offices of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that bills itself as the intellectual base of the America First movement.
Simon Hankinson, the foundation’s senior fellow for immigration and border security, disputed that the US had a shortage of talent and skilled labour. If anything, he said, the skills shortfall was caused by “deep rot” in US educational institutions, where “meritocracy has been replaced with equity – everyone gets an A”.
“The specialty workers that even big American companies really need – as opposed to want – should fit in a bus, and not a stadium,” Hankinson said.
He was also at odds with Trump’s newfound enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, which the president proudly says America will dominate. Instead, Hankinson said AI was poised to take a wrecking ball to the job market.
“We all somehow think that it’s going to make us richer, it’s going to grow the economy, it’s going to make us more productive. But nobody has any clue what jobs are going to be left over. So, given this uncertainty, why would we put foreign workers’ needs ahead of those of our own graduates and our own workers?”
Similar concerns have been raised by Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former MAGA diehard-turned-outspoken critic who has recently broken with the president on everything from Epstein to healthcare to foreign policy.
“Promoting H1-B visas to replace American jobs, bringing in 600,000 Chinese students to replace American students … those are not ‘America first’ positions,” Greene told CNN last weekend.
She also scolded Trump for spending too much time overseas. “I said this to him: I would love to see Air Force One be parked and stay home, and there be nothing but a constant focus from the White House on a domestic agenda.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene (right) at a press conference on the Epstein files on Tuesday.Credit: AP
Trump is publicly calling Greene – who on Saturday AEDT announced she would resign from Congress in January – a lunatic, a disgrace and a traitor. At a news conference with Epstein’s victims this week, she retorted: “Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves.”
Spending too much time overseas is a complaint that gets levelled at many world leaders, including Anthony Albanese and Britain’s Keir Starmer. Dennis Lennox, a Republican strategist, says it is usual for second-term presidents to elevate foreign affairs in importance as they look to secure their legacy on the world stage. Trump is proud of his efforts to end wars, and he has an eye on the Nobel Peace Prize.
But there is also friction in MAGA about foreign policy decisions. Plenty of “America first” subscribers question the US’s alliance with Israel and its funding of Israel’s defence. Others indulge antisemitic conspiracy theories about money and power. Republican senator Ted Cruz recently called out rising antisemitism on the right, and said it had to be reckoned with.
That internal skirmish played out in dramatic fashion at the Heritage Foundation, when its president, Kevin Roberts, saw fit to defend commentator Tucker Carlson over his sympathetic interview with declared white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
This week, Princeton University Professor Robert George quit the Heritage board in protest, joining a slew of employees and advisers who have resigned as the fallout rolls on. Roberts has apologised extensively.
Meanwhile, some MAGA allies are questioning Trump’s $US40 billion bailout for Argentina, or his apparent flirtation with regime change in Venezuela. Such tensions between isolationism and intervention have long plagued the movement; recall Carlson’s opposition to Trump’s risky airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, or Vance’s scepticism about bombing the Houthis in Yemen in March.“I think we are making a mistake,” he said in a leaked Signal group chat.
Trump’s base aside, the bigger question is what impact these ructions have on his power. Two recent episodes suggest he is losing the iron grip he once had on Republicans in Congress.
The first relates to Epstein. Trump opposed the bill to release the Epstein files. His aides lobbied Republicans as recently as last week to take their name off the petition. It failed. When it was clear the bill would pass, Trump reversed course and told Republicans to vote for it.
Molly Reynolds, vice president of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, says it was a “notable event”, but she is not convinced it represented a major pivot for Republicans and their relationship to Trump. She says the politics of the Epstein issue had taken on their own momentum, with many Republicans hearing about it from constituents and members of the right-wing ecosystem.
“I tend to see this as not a real turning point,” Reynolds told a Brookings event in Washington on Wednesday. “Maybe I’ll be proven wrong.”
The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is now in position off the coast of Venezuela.Credit: AP
However, there is another, oft-overlooked example of Republican resistance to Trump. During the government shutdown, the president tried hard to convince his party to ditch the Senate filibuster – the rule that allows the minor party (Democrats) to block legislation unless it can get 60 votes (rather than a simple majority of 50 per cent plus one).
But Republicans never acted. “The votes aren’t there,” Senate leader John Thune said at the time. Nor was there much of an attempt to whip those votes.
Lennox says there is no question Trump is still the titular head of the Republican Party and the broader MAGA and America First movements. However, with the midterm elections less than a year away, and Trump heading towards his lame duck era, his hold is fading, and new faces and new voices are elevating issues they believe are aligned with Trumpist orthodoxy.
“While Trump arguably created the movement, the movement is evolving,” Lennox says. “The big question heading into the midterms in 2026 and then the open presidential race in 2028 is: does Trump continue to sit back, or does he actively get involved and select an heir apparent?”
The presumed frontrunner, Vance, is making his case. At the Breitbart event on Friday (AEDT), the 41-year-old acknowledged tensions in the MAGA movement, but he said this was a healthy part of any political discourse. He said only that the disagreements shouldn’t pull focus from their common “enemy”.
“It’s totally reasonable for the people that make up this coalition to argue about what our foreign policy should be, what our specific tax policy should be, what our housing policy should be,” Vance said.
“My attitude is: let these debates play out, but don’t let the debates that we’re having internally blind us to the fact that we’re up against a radical leftist movement ... that has no animating principle, that has no agenda for the American people – their sole obsession is to take down Donald Trump.
“We have to remember that we have a lot more in common than we do not in common … Focus on the enemy. Have our debates, but focus on the enemy so that we can win victories that matter for the American people,” Vance said.
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