Over the holiday season, a nasty fight erupted between different factions of the Republican Party. On one side are the MAGA faithful: the true believers who want mass deportation, “America First” economic autarky, and so on, like Stephen Miller, Laura Loomer, and Steve Bannon. On the other are a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires, above all Elon Musk, who clearly believes he has bought the government lock, stock, and barrel by spending $44.2 billion on campaign contributions and Twitter.

The fight is over immigration policy, specifically the H-1B program, which allows employers to sponsor temporary visas for certain technical workers. MAGA die-hards hate this program because it gives jobs to non-Americans and because most H-1B recipients are not white. Tech billionaires love it because it saves them money and increases their power.

Loomer started the fight by criticizing the appointment of Sriram Krishnan, who had argued in favor of more skilled immigration, as an adviser for Trump’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Musk responded in cartoon-villain fashion to a small account criticizing him. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he wrote. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

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When Loomer and others kept posting, the self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” Musk reportedly stripped verified Twitter status from Loomer and 52 other accounts associated with her organization. So far at least, a distinctly low-energy Donald Trump is siding with Musk. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he told the New York Post.

It’s anybody’s guess how immigration policy will shake out in Trump’s second term. But we can be confident that Elon Musk thinks he is the shadow president, and the only thing he cares about is his own money and power.

Oligarchs like Musk and David Sacks say that the H-1B program is vital because Americans are too stupid and lazy to learn technical skills. This is not remotely true—on the contrary, there is currently a sizable surplus of technical labor, as the generation that had “learn to code” as the automatic route to a six-figure salary beaten into them graduates, while the tech industry conducts mass layoffs. Indeed, a major motivation of the “learn to code” dogma was coming from tech company brass enraged at high labor costs.

The real reason the capitalist class loves H-1B is as a weapon of class warfare. First, it provides a pool of highly exploitable labor who have to obey the boss’s every command or risk deportation. Second, that pool provides leverage against domestic workers who have to compete against exploited H-1Bs. Tech oligarchs are always doing this kind of thing. Back in 2015, Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe paid $415 million to settle a class action lawsuit over a conspiracy to not poach each other’s top talent and thus keep wages down. “I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this,” Steve Jobs wrote to Google’s Eric Schmidt in 2007.

In short, the MAGA faithful are not entirely incorrect to say H-1B harms the American working class. However, as Steve Randy Waldman points out, the solution is not to deport all those visa holders, but to fold the program into a streamlined general employment-based visa program (which leads to permanent residency) and give them all green cards so they are not so exploitable. Alas, that kind of sensible immigration reform is not going to happen with Trump as president.

What we can say is that the Republican coalition is deeply split, not only in terms of policy but also in terms of power. As Paul Krugman points out, Trump’s economic agenda is starkly contradictory and absurd—he wants to pass another huge tax cut for the rich and add lots of tariffs, which will mean higher interest rates and a larger trade deficit, but he also wants lower interest rates and to slash the trade deficit. One priority or the other will have to go, or perhaps both if he screws up badly enough.

Relatively recently, the Republican propaganda machine might have convinced the party faithful that whatever Trump ended up doing was good by definition. Surveys of Republican economic sentiment have little to do with the economy, but they measure the party of the president with the accuracy of a seismograph.

But now there is another Republican propaganda machine (Twitter/X) under the sole control of the richest person in the world, who has his own interests that are not at all aligned with the MAGA die-hards, and is also a highly erratic, compulsive online poster. Recall that just before the holidays, Musk blew up a budget negotiation by repeating a bunch of deranged lies about what was in it—but as my colleague David Dayen reported, when it was renegotiated, a bunch of controls on investments in China that would have harmed Tesla’s business were mysteriously absent.

Trump has not even taken office yet, and already we are getting government of the Elon Musk, by the Elon Musk, for the Elon Musk. America First!