The battle for working people

Well, we knew it couldn’t last. Donald Trump’s bizarre coalition of Maga folks and billionaires came together mainly to win the election, and the president-elect promised both sides of the moon. Now, we are beginning to see that this group really shares little in common, starting with their attitudes towards labour and immigration.

Witness the online battle between Maga influencer Laura Loomer and Elon Musk over the issue of H-1B visas for foreign skilled workers. I take on this rift in my column today, but here I want to talk about what it means for a larger political battle coming down the pike: the fight for the votes of working people.

Trump made his original appeal to his base — the working and middle class — by pledging support for American workers who have been left behind, particularly in the Rust Belt and the south. This meant prioritising the hiring of local workers, even if they tend to be more expensive than foreign nationals.

But now that Trump has won again, he seems far less interested in the heartland. Instead, he and his billionaire inner circle are just as in thrall to Silicon Valley tech bros as Democrats are — if not more so — preferring the cheapest labour where and when they need it, regardless of nationality.

It would be one thing if they did this while also advocating for more resources for the American educational system. But, as the economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu told me recently, “one of the issues with the H-1B programme is that is has become a vehicle for elites to give up on the US educational system.”

Now, let’s be clear, Loomer is not the ideal messenger for this debate. Lots of Maga rhetoric, including plenty of what comes out of her mouth, is straight up racist and xenophobic. But she is also brave to stand up to powerful billionaires, including Musk, to make an important point about how to support American workers in the face of global competition.

I spoke to Loomer on the phone last week and she summed it up this way:

Trump has to choose between his promises to the base, and the billionaire donor class that is trying to redefine what it means to be Maga. It’s going to be a blow-up.

Loomer predicts that if he chooses the latter, which seems likely, a lot of Maga voters will be inclined to sit out the midterm elections.

Democrats are already preparing for this eventuality. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders weighed in on the H-1B debate last week, accusing Musk of choosing immigrant labour, not because it is better, but because it is “cheaper”. Also, a group of left and centre leaning academics, entrepreneurs and lawyers circulated a memo last week about the Loomer-Musk divide, noting that “while Loomer holds many views well outside the mainstream . . . Musk and his associates are a far greater threat to the Republic, freedom and worker’s rights . . . This moment is ripe for building cross-ideological coalitions against his influence.” It got positive reviews from many influential people in left-wing political circles.

There has always been a certain amount of overlap between Maga and the labour left. (About 40 per cent of union members voted for Trump, according to exit polling). And some progressives are already talking about how to exploit the rifts between Trump’s base and his billionaires with messaging around worker solidarity, portraying “King” Musk as a monarch in waiting, tech bros as the ultimate meritocrats filled with IQ elitism, and so on.

It seems clear to me that whichever party can hold on to the working class will win in 2026 and beyond. But it’s, as of yet, unclear to me whether Musk himself will last beyond two years, or whether Democrats can do more than just vilify the billionaire class. Can they come up with any kind of snazzy political messaging that really appeals to the Maga base or the working class at large?

It’s clear that voters want the party to tack that way. A December poll by Data for Progress, a left-leaning polling group, found that 89 per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents believe that the next Democratic National Committee chair should be someone with stronger ties to working and middle-class voters than corporate executives.

Peter, my questions to you are: what lessons do you take from the Loomer-Musk feud? And do you think Republicans will be able to hang on to their base at the same time that Trump courts the billionaire class? 

 Recommended reading

• I loved this Adam Grant opinion piece in The New York Times on why grades, not just grit, still matter. The central point is that if you are praised for only effort rather than results, you may fail to adopt better strategies for success.

• Kenneth Rogoff is spot on about how Trump will politicise the Fed.

• I’m glad I’m not the only opera fan, and that — according to this New Yorker piece by Alex Ross — there’s evidence that younger audiences around the country are embracing the form.

• I’m looking forward, following this review by one of my favourite feature writers Rebecca Mead, to picking up academic Eva Payne’s book Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution. I hope it answers the eternal question — why are Americans so strange about sex?

• And finally, in the FT, don’t miss my colleague Janan Ganesh’s first 2025 column on why things might have to get worse before they get better. The Carter Rule tells us we need a real crisis to get systems to change. I think that’s true, and amazingly we haven’t hit it yet.

Peter Spiegel responds

Rana, when it comes to the politics of economic policy, I (perhaps naively) hold on to the belief that what works best economically is what will work best politically. And here, I fear the economic evidence is against Laura Loomer and Bernie Sanders.

There are certainly areas of the US economy where corporate executives are pushing to maintain liberal immigration policies to keep labour costs lower. But in my experience, that’s not what’s happening in the H-1B debate, where the fight is not about unskilled labour that may be depressing wages for middle-class workers (though the literature is a bit divided on how much this actually happens). H-1Bs are non-immigrant visas for skilled workers in areas of the US economy where there are skill shortages.

Are the H-1B rules abused to bring in cheap labour from overseas? I suspect they are, but overwhelmingly what I’ve heard from executives in the tech sector is that they’re struggling to find US citizens with the engineering or coding skills to fill the vacancies that they have. 

Take my home state of Arizona. It’s been a big winner of the Biden administration’s Chips Act, with both Taiwan Semiconductor and Intel constructing huge fabs in the state. But TSMC has been forced to bring in engineers from Taiwan because they couldn’t find enough US-based engineers to fill their openings. Arizona State University has vastly ramped up its engineering programme to meet the need, but the skills gap persists.

It is a bit of a trope by now, but it bears repeating: much of what makes up Silicon Valley today was built by foreigners, be they Google co-founder Sergey Brin (born and raised in Moscow), eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (Paris), Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella (Hyderabad), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (Madurai) — or of course Musk himself (Pretoria) and his ideological fellow-traveller and PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel (Frankfurt).

There are few things more important to the US economy than to remain a talent magnet for the best and brightest the world over. The fact that Loomer is on the other side of this argument makes me feel ok with that stance.