Elon Musk pretty much declared civil war against MAGA over H-1B visas, but you’d never know that from watching Fox, where the discussion has either been nonexistent, or whitewashed the way it was on Fox & Friends this Sunday.
I’ve been scouring the network for mentions of Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer over the last few days, and it’s been radio silence over there for the most part, with no mentions of Loomer at all, a scant few mentioning Bannon, and lots of mentions about Musk and Ramaswamy, but not about the dust up they just caused, and primarily about their supposed policy proposals for Trump instead.
Here’s how the crew on the curvy couch covered Musk telling MAGA to go f*ck yourselves in the face. Dance around the topic and make light of it as much as possible, find a way to blame Joe Biden for what’s going on now and attack him for reversing the Trump attempt to end H-1B visas, and try to explain away Trump’s conflicting statements on the policy:
Today, defending Musk, Trump claimed he “always” has supported H1B Visas. But on June 22, 2020, Trump issued an executive action suspending H1B Visas because he said the program was taking jobs from American workers
trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential…
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) December 28, 2024 at 7:25 PM
CAMPOS-DUFFY: Well, yesterday you guys know we had quite a few discussions on the debate that’s raging online right now about H-1B visas, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy coming out saying, hey, we need this. Our country needs this. Our companies need this. We need this to have this technological advantage over China and other countries.
And other people saying, I’m not so sure. A lot of those H-1B visas are for coding, and they’re sort of the grunt work of the tech industry, and there’s a lot of Americans who would like those jobs, and we should be working on training them instead of replacing them with foreign workers who presumably will do it for cheaper.
So that’s the debate that’s raging. And in the midst of that, someone has found a quote from Donald Trump where he says he backs H-1B visas. Now that would be contradictory to what he has said in the past. We’ll have to get to the bottom of that.
But here’s what he said on this. He said, the New York Post reported on Saturday, he said, “I’ve always liked the visas. I’ve always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I’ve used it many times. It’s a great program.”
HURT: You know, this is, I think, as we talked about yesterday, it’s such an important debate. It’s happening entirely among Republicans and within Trump world. And obviously, what he is talking about here is the fact that, he’s obviously defending the program, but what I also think is sort of interesting is that he put into place in his first term a lot of restrictions that protected the program, that reformed the program.
And of course, one of the first things Joe Biden did, including opening the border wide open to let lots and lots of unskilled labor into the country, that we have no control over, also removed a lot of those reforms to the H-1B visa program so that it was open to to widespread abuse.
CAIN: In fact, this was Stephen Miller tweeted back in 2023 talking about the first Trump term in his position H-1B visas. He said “Biden axed Trump admin H-1B reforms which eliminated its use for cheap labor raised wages to stop displacement outlawed substitution and replaced H-1B lotteries with high paying offers which precluded substitutions. Regs were scrapped and now big tech is replacing Americans.”
So Trump weighs in yesterday suggesting he supports H-1B visas. Now in the past he has looked for reforms to H-1B visas. Now on the surface, this issue I don’t think has as deep a divide on the right as one might initially perceive.
Meaning I think a lot of people on the right including obviously Donald Trump and then Elon Musk, support the idea of bringing in whatever percentage it may be 0.01%, whatever the number is, of highly, highly skilled people from across the world.
The idea of bring your best. But the program can’t be abused to box American workers out. That’s been the perspective in the past of Donald Trump. And I suspect it will be the position of Donald Trump in the future.
But the debate got deeper, and it got more contentious on the cultural level. And for example, that’s where I took some exception to what I thought the Vivek Ramaswamy made a too sweeping an indictment of American culture.
Elon, by the way, weighed in immediately after Trump.
CAMPOS-DUFFY: Pretty soundly, by the way.
CAIN: Pretty soundly. Well, Elon, this is a quote from Tropic Thunder. He’s memeing. Remember Tropic Thunder with Robert Downey Jr.?
HURT: Can we actually read the entire quote? I don’t know if you can do it.
Which was followed by them reading Musk’s tweet, but substituting “f*ck yourself in the face” with “have fun with yourself in the face” while the hosts chuckled.
No mention, of course, of how Bannon has responded to Musk and Ramaswamy, or the fact the Mr. supposed “free speech” advocate Musk suspended a bunch of MAGA accounts on Xitter. I hate to break it to them, but it doesn’t look like that “debate that’s raging online right now” is going to end anytime soon:
Steve Bannon continues attacking Elon and Vivek:
“Attacking American Workers; Attacking American Culture; Attacking American Families”
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) December 28, 2024 at 5:32 PM
Steve Bannon called Elon Musk, a “toddler”
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) December 28, 2024 at 1:07 AM
Christine Holder is a writer at AZ News, where she covers politics, health, business, and finance. She has been with the publication for three years. Prior to that, she worked as a writer for several other publications in Arizona.
Christine is also a huge fan of dogs and spends much of her free time volunteering at local animal shelters.
