Donald Trump’s former White House strategist called the tech mogul a “really bad person” and said arresting him before Jan. 20 was “a non-public matter. “
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Donald Trump’s former senior advisor Steve Bannon has taken another swipe at Elon Musk, claiming he will personally see that the billionaire is “kicked out” of the president-elect’s inner-circle prior to his inauguration next week.
MAGA’s infighting intensified Sunday after Bannon criticized Musk over the H-1B program, which allows U. S. employers to factor in transient nonimmigrant visas in an effort to close skills gaps in sectors that require highly specialized knowledge.
The lead strategist of Trump’s first term in the White House, who was fired after seven months in August 2017, called Musk “an evil person” and said the waning influence over the new commander in chief had become “personal. “
“I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time he’s inaugurated. He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else,” Bannon told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, with his remarks translated to English.
“He’s a bad person. Stopping him has become a private challenge for me. Before, because he invested a lot of money, he was in a position to tolerate it. No more. “
Musk, who earned the moniker “First Buddy” for being a near-constant presence around Trump since the president-elect’s win at the ballot box in November, is set to lead the non-official, newly-created Department of Government Efficiency with one-time vice-president hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy.
He reportedly spent more than $270 million of his own money to help re-elect Trump in the election cycle, most of it through his super-political action committee, America PAC.
The staunchly anti-immigrant cult of Trump World has been thrown into a state of turmoil after Silicon Valley tech figures, led by Musk and Ramaswamy, came out in favor of the visas, which are intended for highly skilled immigrants in the fields. of technology, fitness care and engineering and finance.
Bannon argues that, in turn, the visas take jobs away from American citizens.
“The problem is that techno-feudalists are using them to their advantage and people are furious,” Bannon continued.
The veteran Trump loyalist argued that Musk, who was born in South Africa and who in the past held an H-1B visa, was only serving his own interests by supporting the program, and the Tesla CEO was profiting on his own from hiring qualified foreign personnel. account. business.
Bannon then put Musk in the same basket as fellow South African tech billionaires David Sachs and Peter Thiel, telling them to return to South Africa.
“Why do we have white South Africans, the most racist people in the world, commenting on everything that happens in the United States?” Asked.
“He will do anything to make sure each and every business he owns is protected, gets better terms, or makes more money. The aggregation of wealth and, through wealth, power: this is its objective. American personnel will not tolerate this.
Bannon went on to claim that Musk’s only goal is to become a “trillionaire”. In another section, the former Breitbart editor said that he “kicked [Musk] out of the White House every day for 30 days straight in 2017, when he was trying to get subsidies paid by American workers.”
The online war of words began to heat up last month after Elon Musk endorsed an article that called U. S. personnel too “re******” to fill highly skilled tech positions for which foreign personnel were hired.
Trump, who in his first term moved to limit the visas’ use and said they were “very bad” for U.S. workers, sided with Musk and told the New York Post on December 28 that he has “always been in favor of the visas”.
He added: “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. Me on the H-1B. I have used it several times. It is a perfect program. Bannon emphasized in the Corriere interview that he and Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders were on the same side of the debate.
“I love Bernie, who just joined the H1B visa party. “We’ve been fighting this war for ten years and Bernie hasn’t said a word because of everything the Democratic Party is taking from the technofeudalists. “
Hours earlier, Musk said that “hateful, unrepentant racists” must be eliminated from the Republican Party “root to root,” calling his critics “despicable fools. “
“America rose to greatness over the past 150 years, because it was a meritocracy more than anywhere else on Earth,” he wrote on X.“I will fight to my last drop of blood to ensure that it remains that land of freedom and opportunity.”
Bannon on Gettr: “Bring it, dude, everything. “
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