The influence of billionaire Elon Musk on the next presidency of Donald Trump may not be able to be exercised with the ease that the strong figure of Silicon Valley has been hoping for for months.
This is because the presence of the owner of network America Great Again). Worse, it is even beginning to induce a schism within the most radicalized followers of the next Republican president, leading to tensions that could disrupt the rapid march promised by Donald Trump to bring the United States in tune with his political program.
“Elon Musk will be chased away [de Washington] before the day of swearing-in [du nouveau président] “, promised Stephen Bannon last week, former special advisor to the billionaire and architect of the Trumpist victory during the 2016 presidential election. “He will not have a pass for the White House, he will not have privileged access to the west wing [du bâtiment, siège du pouvoir exécutif américain]he will be like any other person. »
“He is truly evil, he is a bad person,” he continued in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. “Stopping him became a personal matter for me. »
The developing internal war found its fuel at the end of last year, with the decision taken by Donald Trump to make Sriram Krishnan, Silicon Valley financier, entrepreneur born in India and close to Elon Musk, his advisor in artificial intelligence. Mr. Krishnan has been the spokesperson in recent weeks for the extension of a visa and green card program allowing the recruitment of highly qualified foreign workers to contribute to the economic development and global influence of the Silicon Valley.
After restricting access to these visas – known by their code name H-1B – at the end of his first term as president on the pretext of “abuse”, Donald Trump now seems to adhere more closely to the idea promoted by Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to maintain and strengthen them in order to combat the permanent shortage of qualified employees in the tech world.
The two men are expected to take charge upon the populist’s return to Washington of the “Department of Government Effectiveness”, an informal agency created by Donald Trump to reduce public spending and the size of the American civil service.
Nearly 70% of Silicon Valley employees were born abroad, according to 2016 census data. India and China top the list of countries providing the skills sought by companies in the digital economy.
Conspiracy and frolicking
« [Vivek Ramaswamy] knows that the Great Replacement is real”, wrote on the X network the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who speaks in the ear of Donald Trump, referring here to the conspiracy and racist theory suggesting that a project exists in the United States to make native Americans disappear under a “migratory submergence”. Remember that it is Mme Loomer who convinced Donald Trump to highlight false rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio, during last September’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris.
“It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H-1B visas, not an extension,” she said. He added: “Tech billionaires can’t just walk into Mar-a-Lago with their huge checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policies so they can have unlimited numbers of slave laborers from India and China which will never assimilate. »
The argument was even taken up by Nikki Haley, former opponent of Donald Trump during the Republican primary, who, at the end of December, called on Facebook to “invest and give priority to Americans, not foreign workers”, on the labor market.
Against a backdrop of racist remarks, Stephen Bannon went even further by inviting Elon Musk to “return to South Africa”, where he was born, rather than stick his nose in the affairs of the American state. “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on the planet, white South Africans… commenting on what is happening in the United States? » he asked, in the paradoxical tone of xenophobia, in the pages of the Italian daily.
People around Trump are tired of his presence, he continued. “ [Elon Musk] demonstrated his intrusiveness, his lack of understanding of the real issues and his unique support for himself. His only goal is to become a billionaire [en établissant une fortune de 1000 milliards de dollars]. He will do anything to ensure that every business he owns will be protected, get better contracts, or make more money. The aggregation of wealth and, through wealth, of power: this is its only goal. »
After having injected more than 250 million dollars into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and put his social network immigration. Last November, a poll conducted by the Rasmussen Institute found that 60% of Americans believed the country had enough qualified people domestically to fill white-collar positions, making an increase in H-1B visas unnecessary. . The proportion reaches more than 70% among Republicans.
And the frolicking of recent days on this issue does not bode well for the first measures that the new Trump administration is preparing to take, estimates Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. He sees in the appearance of these publicly expressed tensions within the MAGA movement a fertile ground for the first dysfunctions of his collective project. “It is a harbinger of future conflicts. It’s like a pre-match,” he told Washington Post.
