A year ago, Donald Trump literally dodged a bullet, and his presidential campaign tipped from insurgent to mythic. Then, a few days later, his running-mate JD Vance accepted the Vice-Presidential nomination, in a speech pledging that the Trump administration would “commit to the working man”.
Existing citizens should be prioritised, he said: “We’re done importing foreign labour, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. No more globalism, was the message: “America is not just an idea,” he told a rapturous audience. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
A year on, though, it’s looking more wobbly. Last weekend, Elon Musk, whose support helped propel Trump to victory, launched his new “America Party”, promising the American people that this will “give you back your freedom”. The party’s X account has since squared up to the Trumpian project, declaring: “MAGA is the past. Woke is a distraction. The middle is the future.”
Is there really political runway for a new, tech-forward, centrist party? Who knows. But the irony is that this is, in fact, what Trump is trying to create — while Musk’s project wildly misunderstands the actual terrain he seeks to influence. Combing through the ins and outs of the now seemingly defunct Trump-Musk bromance, we find that what precipitated the breakup is not Trump’s departure from “centrist politics”, but his efforts to create a new centre, in seeking to balance the diametrically opposed interests of the two halves of his coalition, on the most politically salient issue of the election: immigration. And the surprising conclusion is that even if Musk’s new party seems unlikely to succeed, his anger is justified — because he got played.
The Trumpian Republican Party has long since abandoned the previous version of “centrist” American conservatism, which embraced a bipartisan economic consensus that tolerated penalties to the American middle class and relatively high immigration, provided all contributed to GDP growth overall. But while Trump’s challenge to this consensus was controversial enough in the 2016-2020 term, it has been far trickier to navigate this time, because his 2024 coalition was freshly-bolstered by Silicon Valley tech bros who — if they aren’t precisely neoliberals — are certainly more in favour of high immigration than the MAGA base.
From the get-go, then, Trump 2.0 has been caught between Big Tech donors whose cultural affinities and business interests tend strongly toward enabling large-scale migration, and an electoral base for whom economic and cultural nationalism are the whole point of voting for Trump. This tension bubbled to the surface almost immediately following Trump’s election last year, via the totemic issue of H1B visas. This controversial programme enables companies to bring workers to the USA from overseas, typically into medium- to high-skilled knowledge jobs in tech, engineering, and business. Critics allege that this visa route is used to undercut native wages and cut corners on employment rights. But especially to internationally-oriented, tech-forward employers in Silicon Valley, the potential H1B affords to scour the world for talent is obviously appealing, even as the same quality makes it just as obviously antithetical to the interests of native workers.
The conflict between Trump’s Silicon Valley backers and those relying on Trump to protect them from foreign competitors did not take long to surface. When erstwhile Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an ill-judged social media post blaming American culture for US firms giving preference to workers from overseas, the backlash to his statements was furious. It didn’t help that Ramaswamy himself is of Indian heritage, like many of America’s H1B workers. Ramaswamy had been tipped to join Musk at DOGE, Trump’s waste-cutting programme, but backlash to his statements only died down once Trump’s qualified expression of support for H1B — a sop to his new tech-bro friends — was complemented by throwing Ramaswamy under the bus.
Even before Trump’s inauguration, then, a sense of suspicion already hung in the air. The interests of MAGA and Silicon Valley are so obviously orthogonal on immigration that this could hardly be otherwise. I have wondered for some time how he planned to square that circle; now, one way of reading the Trump/Musk break-up is as a tragic byproduct of Trump’s efforts to do so. Specifically, via the measures required to get Trump’s Congressional spending megabill over the line, including a massive boost to US border security funding.
“The interests of MAGA and Silicon Valley are so obviously orthogonal”
The bill, referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, is a 940-page legislative behemoth. Fiercely opposed by a number of Republicans for the $3.9 trillion fiscal hawks estimate it will add to the national debt, and by most progressives for its swingeing healthcare cuts, reversal on renewables, and tax-cuts for the rich, the centrepiece of the OBBB is a staggering $170bn funding boost to ICE, to support mass deportations. The rest is a thicket of carve-outs, red tape, and special pleading, set to swell the US government deficit considerably, and furiously denounced by Elon Musk as a “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK”.
But what if all this pork has been accepted as the price of delivering Trump’s promise to MAGA, on immigration? The boost to ICE makes this department now bigger and costlier than most militaries, meaning that while Trump may have pivoted from his 2016 opposition to H1B visas, in a clear sign of compromise with Silicon Valley, he’s still trying to make good on his pledge to cut the low-skilled and illegal kinds. In other words: Trump may be attempting to actually deliver the genuinely centrist “some immigration, but the high-skilled kind only” programme that every political party promises, and none ever delivers.
Musk, then, may be trying to set himself up as the centrist alternative to MAGA. But in terms of the most salient issue in the last US election, and constrained by the proverbial political “art of the possible”, it appears actually to be Trump who is trying to carve out the centre ground. Musk, meanwhile, is obviously furious and bewildered — and, also, possibly deeply betrayed.
And no wonder. He burned a third of Tesla’s share price and a great deal of his personal cultural capital on driving DOGE. This initially promised $2 trillion in US government savings; but Musk left DOGE in May, and the project seems not to have achieved anything like this in practice. Again, we might see this as hubris, failure — or alternatively as Musk having been used, by cannier political operators. For while DOGE never achieved the vaunted $2 trillion in savings, it was effective at kneecapping Trump’s internal political foes in USAID and the Department of Education — moves adumbrated in Project 2025, then realised with Musk’s help.
Was that always what DOGE was for? Was Musk simply used to deliver it? Key figures in Trump’s team have certainly read Machiavelli, even if Trump himself isn’t a books guy. In any case, having sacrificed so much net worth and personal capital on this venture Musk might be forgiven for expecting a little quid pro quo, such as cushy treatment for his business interests. And yet the OBBB has taken a chainsaw to renewables subsidies — including several that will directly impact Tesla’s bottom line, potentially to the tune of billions. Trump himself has alleged that these losses are the real reason for Musk’s rage at the OBBB.
Reading past the sound and fury on social media, then, the picture that emerges is of Musk as a newcomer to politics: one who imagined it to be like business, where you hire smart people and they do what you ask them to do. Instead, he got comprehensively out-manoeuvred. He was deployed as a means of neutralising hostile departments in the permanent bureaucracy, then just as abruptly retired when he took his ostensible duties too literally and his cuts started causing awkward headlines. Then he was dispensed with altogether, as it began to dawn on him that his government allies never really cared that much about cost-cutting, and that the aims were rather always political: namely, a wholesale reshaping of the American political behemoth.
Meanwhile, within the terms of what actually can be done in the world as it is, Trump’s regime seems, is consolidating. If the OBBB border security mega-splurge does what it’s intended to do, I don’t expect Musk’s party to get anywhere. (It’s already being mocked online as the “H1B Party”.) Especially if Trump holds to his alt-centrist stance on migration, permitting a measure of higher-skilled inflow to continue even as the deportations escalate, chances are he’ll keep enough of the business lobby onside, including in Silicon Valley. If Trump achieves this, while retaining the trust of MAGA and without bankrupting his country, he will be unstoppable. There will be no need for long-winded theorising on what a nation is or isn’t, whether or how far America is made of immigrants or ethnic blocs or whatever. The messy reality will be good enough for enough of the electorate.
As for Musk, he is obviously an extraordinarily gifted and driven man in many respects. But if things continue to go Trump’s way, it won’t be long before everyone (including Musk) quietly abandons the “America Party”, and resumes making the best of the actually existing America, chaos and compromise and all.
