A conflict within the Republican party has emerged following the appointment of Sriram Krishnan, a venture capitalist who supports H-1B visas, to a top AI policy position in the incoming Trump administration.
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, there was a simmering tension in Republican politics about one of the party’s top priorities. At the top of the GOP ticket, Donald Trump condemned immigrants in unusually ugly terms — at times, literally echoing Adolf Hitler and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country — but beneath the surface, there was a conflict that went largely unaddressed.
Much of the Republican base took Trump’s rhetoric quite seriously and blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s ills. Some of the candidate’s top allies, however, especially from the private sector, saw nuances that would allow businesses to benefit from workers from abroad. During a campaign, these tensions can be put aside. After a campaign, those tensions tend to bubble over. It was against this backdrop that the president-elect announced early last week that venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan — a proponent of green cards for skilled workers — would work in Trump’s incoming administration, serving in a top artificial intelligence policy post. The news was not well received on the far-right. A highly controversial MAGA activist named Laura Loomer — who spent at least part of the year as a member of Trump’s inner circle — condemned the decision to hire Krishnan, pointing to his support for the H-1B program, which provides temporary worker visas for high-skilled tech workers. An ugly back-and-forth, which some have labeled the “MAGA civil war,” erupted soon after. On one side of the divide are prominent far-right voices such as Loomer and Steve Bannon, who have spent the last week clashing with figures such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They all remain Trump allies, of course, but they’ve also targeted each other in caustic and personal ways, culminating in the world’s wealthiest individual publishing a tweet in which he urged many of the president-elect’s supporters, “Take a big step back and f--- yourself in the face.
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