‘Trump will always side with Trump’s wallet’: A civil war is growing online, but not between who you’d think

A civil war has been brewing in the United States for years now, as the class divide and ideological chasm grow ever larger, and citizens find themselves starkly opposed to their neighbors.

Its only getting worse, now that Donald Trump has won a second term, and frightened Americans are staring down the barrel of a notoriously self-serving gun. We — those of us with brains, that is — have long known that Trump would always put his own interests above those of the nation at large, but that fact is only now starting to dawn on the people who voted him into office.

Those people — the very same ones who reacted in shock upon learning who tariffs really affect, and what Obamacare actually stands for — are just now realizing how badly they’ve set the country up for failure. As this extremely obvious fact begins to dawn on them, the civil war is beginning, but its not the right versus the left — its MAGA vs MAGA.

The MAGA movement is imploding, as Trump’s first day in office nears and those passionate, Trump-loving hard-right voters start to turn on one another. Or, more specifically, on the people Trump is tapping to lead the charge. People like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are weeks away from stepping into a strange government-adjacent role as the co-heads of the incoming Department of Government Efficiency.

The pair of actual billionaires — Ramaswamy is worth an impressive $1 billion while his counterpart, the wealthiest man in the world, is worth a truly criminal $426.5 billion — are suddenly finding themselves in opposition to actual Republican voters, and its all thanks to the growing divide between the pair of grifters and Steve Bannon.

Bannon isn’t nearly as intertwined with the Trump movement this time around — apparently that stint in prison taught a few lessons — but he’s still pulling populist strings from afar. He remains among the most influential right-wing commentators out there, and his opinions continue to sway the average far-right voter far more than many people realize.

Which is why, when the 71-year-old lashed out at Ramaswamy and Musk in late December, blasting Musk as a “globalist” and claiming that he would take a check “from Adolph Hitler,” people responded. Despite all the love for First Lady Musk over the last few weeks, and the continued desperate fidelity of his tech bro fanbase, it seems the tides are starting to turn in the MAGA camp.

As observed by clever TikTok commentator @bostonsmalls5, the MAGA movement has encountered a hurdle: There’s a growing divide between the money (aka the mega-wealthy incompetents Trump is tapping to join the government) and the people (aka the voters who allowed this cursed reality to come to pass.) That divide is largely a result of the infighting between Musk and Bannon, but its also thanks to targeted messaging on Bannon’s part.

As the “leading propagandist on the far-right,” Bannon has massive sway among Republican voters. He’s been reshaping the narrative, targeting specific groups with key messaging, and now that it goes against Musk’s stance on the matter, that puts them at odds. It all seemingly boils down to their difference of opinion on H-1B Visas, which allow employers “to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations.” Its often used in the tech industry, and Musk himself came to America on an H-1B.

Which is why he and Ramaswamy are in such staunch support of the Visa program, despite the fact that Trump has twice campaigned on an anti-immigration platform. The selfishly-motivated reversal goes against the general immigration stance of the movement that elevated both men, and it would have made them enemies of the MAGA base, had Trump not stepped into back them.

Now the MAGAs find themselves in a strange quagmire. The man they treat as a god supports Musk and Ramaswamy, who in turn support (certain) immigration. But the reason they voted for Trump is all that rampant anti-immigration messaging, which drenched both his 2016 and 2024 campaigns. Its leading them not to a realization, but to a bitter battle, and one that won’t be won by either side anytime soon.