Trump's Promise to Issue Green Cards to Foreign Students Causes MAGA Angst
"This is America Last," say disappointed followers, upon hearing Trump's All In Podcast interview. MAGA dissatisfaction with Trump is small but real.
On Thursday, Trump made instant news during an appearance on the popular platform for Bay Area tech bros, the All In Podcast, by seeming to reverse his usual nativist stance and promising an easy immigration path to all foreign students.
“You graduate from a college, you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card,” he said, in response to a request from host David Friedberg to help solve the the tech industry’s challenge finding high-skilled workers in a potential second term. It wasn’t just an empty promise, Trump stressed. “I happen to agree with that.”
The All In Podcast, which has become the standard-bearer for center-right tech bros in recent years, occupies a unique space in the ideological spectrum. Allergic to wokeism, suspicious of Democrats due to their advocacy of higher corporate taxes, they fit uneasily in the MAGA mold, primarily because like much of the tech industry, they would like more imported high-tech workers to be given the glide path into US citizenship.
As host Friedberg pointed out, three of the four hosts are immigrants. He himself is a South African immigrant, as is tech investor David Sacks, one of the so-called “Paypal mafia.” Another, Facebook billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya, is a Sri Lankan born venture capitalist. Both he and Sacks recently cohosted a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco. The fourth host is US-born angel investor Jason Calacanis.
Trump, on the other hand, popularized the “America First” slogan. While he has never clearly stated what that means in policy terms, the slogan itself is a throwback to the isolationist, nativist preferences of the America First Committee of the 1930s, who argued for keeping America out of World War II, informed by antisemitic conspiracy theories held by one of its most prominent members, aviator Charles Lindbergh.
The policies that the Trump administration actually instituted would have warmed Lindbergh’s nativist heart, and ought to be a warning to the All In Pod hosts, if they care to examine his record, rather than allow him pitch them without pushback.
According to a 2020 report by Washington Post, the Trump administration halved the number of legal immigrants allowed in during the last year of his term as compared with the first year of his term through “hundreds of administrative changes,” . One of these of these policies, the “Buy American Hire American” executive order signed in April 2017, led to high-skilled worker visa denials to shoot up from 4% to 42%. This type of visa, the H1B, is one that the tech industry avidly lobbies for.
Trump’s most avid supporters have also easily understood that “America First” is a dog-whistle for nativist and anti-immigrant policies. Far-right nativists have formed his most loyal, and earliest cadre of supporters: including Jeff Sessions, the nativist former senator from Alabama who was the first sitting member of Congress to endorse Trump back in 2016; the senator’s ideological young staffer, Stephen Miller, who went on to head up Trump’s draconian immigration policies, including child separation; and Steve Bannon, a blood-and-soil crusader who, as the White House chief strategist, instituted Trump’s infamous “Muslim ban” early in his term. Bannon is also the man who made the term “globalist”, with its antisemitic overtones, famous as a descriptor for the sworn enemy of the America Firsters.
It is this core Trump base, the blood-and-soil America Firsters, that were disturbed by his comments. Trump cannot afford to have his core base crumble; comments like his green card promise are aimed at the heart of his appeal. Since the failure of bipartisan immigration reform in 2013 due to a rebellion from the Tea Party, if there’s one issue that ought to come with loud “electrical hazard do not touch” warnings for Republican politicians, it is softness on immigration and any hint of amnesty. After Trump’s green card comments on Thursday, the dreaded word “amnesty” began to be heard in reference to him.
Though not high-profile like Bannon or Miller, Trump’s most avid supporters online also understand what “America First” means. Many of them took to social media to object to Trump’s plan to grease the skids for foreign workers.
“This is America Last,” said one commenter on the infamous Patriots.win forum, descendent of the subreddit known as The_Donald where much of Jan 6 was planned out in the open. “My whole family is furious about this,” they went on.
Some merely responded with “No,” “Nope,” “NO NO NO,” or “Absolutely Not.” On that same thread, several commenters used the derogatory term for Indians, “Pahjeet”, one commenter applying it to Nikki Haley, and suggesting that she was an anchor baby.
Trump’s All In Pod interview received quite a bit of notice on the Patriots forum, with eight separate threads at last count discussing Trump’s green card announcement. The comments on all three threads were overwhelmingly negative.
On the other hand, the sister forum devoted to discussing QAnon beliefs, GreatAwakening.win, mostly ignored the issue—it tends to have a looser connection to the real world, as befits a forum devoted to the set of conspiracy theories that originated with an anonymous poster announcing Hillary Clinton’s arrest. One thread on that forum, for instance, discussed whether Trump’s conviction can be considered “real”, given that Biden is a fake president.
Gab is another social media site where the most extreme Trump supporters gather. His comments on the All In Pod were heavily discussed on Gab, with almost universal derision.
Neon Revolt, one of the original QAnon mega-stars who set off online vendettas against Mark Zuckerberg and Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg, who has been an uber Trump fan, wrote a lengthy post on Gab. “It's like watching a hollowed out husk of your 2016 self,” Neon Revolt, whose real name was revealed to be Robert Cornero, wrote. “We DO NOT need more H1B visas.”
A response to Neon Revolt from an account named “RightWingNutSquads” stated that both legal and illegal immigration were problematic, contradicting the usual spin that nativists are merely sticklers for the law. “He is angling for jewbux,” the poster said.
Remarkably, some of the responses to Neon Revolt’s Gab post sounded like they could come out of a Resistence account in their disdain for Trump. An account from “MrWhiteTruth” posted, “He’s nothing but a do nothing but talk windbag who folds like a cheap suit anytime the going gets tough.”
By no means does this portend a wide movement away from Trump. Most of the complainers will probably still choose Trump over Biden or a write-in come November. But this smattering of protest underscores something that has been overlooked.
Most of the media has focused on base dissatisfaction with Trump from his left flank. Some former Republicans have formed media empires around their distaste for Trump, and their desire to see an end to Trumpism in their former party: including Bulwark, The Dispatch, and the Lincoln Project, filled with former Weekly Standard and National Review columnists and some former Republican operatives. Weeks after having dropped out, Nikki Haley still received a hefty 35% of the vote in last week’s Virginia Republican primary.
This breakaway rump represents the old Republican party of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan—the ones derided as “RINO,” or Republican In Name Only, by the populist remainder. RINO preferences tend to run to free trade, interventionist foreign policy, and more legal immigration of high-skilled workers—all positions that Trump and his populist base consider close to treasonous.
This focus on RINO dissatisfaction with Trump has obscured that he has faced some real pushback from his right, populist flank as well, the group generally called “MAGA” as opposed to “RINO”.
MAGA dissatisfaction with Trump is small but real. It centers on Trump’s original populist promise when he catapulted into leadership of the Republican party in 2016: a promise that dispensed with the pieties of the RINOs that the base was already chafing against. His main issues were treating Obama as an illegitimate president by pushing the notion he was born in Kenya, anti-immigrant nativism, economic populism, and rhetoric promoting white resentment. For the last eight years, MAGA devotion to Trump due to these stances has given him a stranglehold over the base.
However, this group was already showing signs of slippage after 2020. Many from this group supported Ron DeSantis in the primary, considering DeSantis a stronger vessel for MAGA populism than Trump. In the first Republican primary election of 2024, before dropping out, DeSantis received 21% of the vote, higher than Haley’s share, and around half of Trump’s.
Ann Coulter, MAGA influencer who has proclaimed her nativist politics for years, was one of Trump’s earliest supporters and even wrote a book titled “In Trump We Trust.” She was also one of the earliest nativists to bolt, breaking with Trump during his term due to his unfulfilled promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico. “This guy [Trump] shouldn’t be our POTUS candidate,” she posted on X on Thursday, regarding his comments on the All In Pod.
But it isn’t just Ann Coulter.
The outlet American Greatness was founded around a populist, nationalist agenda at around the start of the Trump moment. Former assistant editor Pedro Gonzales wrote several articles in praise of Trump: of his tariffs on steel, of his trollish politics, and even of his health.
After Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, Gonzales appears to have awoken from the Trumpian dream. He pinned Trump’s loss to his abandonment of his economic populism. “By the end of his presidency, he was basically governing like Paul Ryan,” Gonzales said in the interview.
In another interview, he called Trumpism a grift, saying that Conservatism Inc. had turned into MAGA Inc.
Gonzales, whose earlier racist and antisemitic chats were exposed during a war with Trump supporters over his support for DeSantis, has become the center of a small but persistent resistence to Trump from the populist right. His critique is that “MAGA Inc.” promotes Trump as a grift, who himself is the uber-grifter, selling out the voters who initially jumped on the Trumpism bandwagon for his economic populism.
In a post on X about Trump’s newly-stated green card policy, he pointed out that despite his nativist rhetoric, Trump was “selling us out for donors” on immigration during his presidency. He also critiqued the cult-like stranglehold that he imposes on the MAGA media complex: pointing out that Tucker Carlson called Trump out before “bending the knee".”
While both the grift and the cult are both undoubtedly real, and left-leaning voters have seen through it from the start (for a groundbreaking pre-Trump example, see “The Long Con” by Rick Perlstein), it is bracing to see it coming from MAGAverse.
Nothing exemplifies this better than Gonzales’s split from American Greatness, which was formed to promote the “Greatness Agenda” without loyalty to any one person. While Gonzales is theorizing about MAGA Inc. on X and elsewhere, American Greatness has produced a documentary about Trump being a victim of the justice system, and in their pages, Julie Kelly has written screed after screed filled with conspiracy theories about the FBI.
As befits a cult, anonymous accounts have felt braver calling out Trump for his perfidy to right wing populism than big-name influencers. As one eloquent example, a former Trump supporter who goes by the name “Peter Heinlein”—which appears to be a pseudonym—has consistently called out Trump’s falsehoods in service of right-wing populism, and the cult around him that keeps this from being openly discussed in MAGAverse.
“After seeing the GOP’s response to Trump promising a bunch of tech billionaire bros that he’d give green cards to every foreign college grad, which was total silence, I’m more convinced than ever that Trump losing is the best thing for conservatives in this country,” he posted. “Trump is for sale.”
Another anonymous account, one named “Trump4Kinggg” with Trump’s image on its banner and a Pepe frog as avatar, posted: “I wasted two years of my life on this issue only to be betrayed by the man who said he was going to fix it once and for all.”
Responses on X to the announcement were filled with disparaging responses, mostly from anonymous accounts. “Not sure I can vote for him,” said one Groyper-themed account. “A gut punch,” said another.
On Gab, true to type, rejection of Trump’s green card promise came with a hefty dose of antisemitism—linked here to avoid repeating the slurs.
What this shows is that there is an undercurrent of rebellion in MAGAverse, although few people are daring to call him out under their own names. This includes elected officials. Senator Mike Lee posted an uncompromising “No” before deleting it. According to policital consultant and writer Ryan Gidursky, Lee’s cowardice was matched by a number of other Republican congresspeople, who, in private, disparaged Trump’s comments.
Steve Bannon, who has made a career out of uncompromising blood-and-soil nativism, came out against Trump’s proposal in his War Room show. “The exit visa should be clipped to the diploma,” he said, asking for a 50% cut in the number of foreign students. However, any critique of Trump himself for making these comments was conspicuous by its absence.
The MAGA rebellion over the green card for foreign students plan, sotto voce though it is, has been heard clearly by the Trump campaign. A couple days after the the All In Pod episode aired, his campaign spokesperson walked back Trump’s promise to the tech investors.
“On day one of [Trump’s] new administration, he’s going to shut down the border and launch the largest mass deportation effort of illegal aliens in history,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the New York Post, sounding more like vintage Trump, “exclud[ing] all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges.”
“Too late,” said anonymous account CalamityJade on Gab. “We caught a glimpse of his agenda.”