This piece originally appeared at The Burn.
Immediately after Election Day 2024, I predicted the three main fault lines that could split apart the MAGA-Tech Right alliance: immigration, bioscience, and war. Well, two out of three ain’t bad. There was already some major Christmastime contention over immigration, ending with Vivek Ramaswamy being the first to depart from DOGE. The debates over bioethics have been slowly boiling along since then, with advances in the genetic screenings of embryos delighting many on the Tech Right but disgusting much of the Republican base. Even still, missing the now-obvious fissure of finance feels like a black mark on my fortune-telling record. As always, it’s the economy, stupid. In my defense, back then, it really did seem like everyone was behind DOGE—who wouldn’t be eager to cut away waste, fraud, and abuse? As tagline goes, the people voted for major reform, and Trump 2.0 might be the only admin capable of delivering it for quite some time, given his vendetta against the “deep state,” his inability to run again, and the surplus of high quality tech-talent that has converged upon the capital to enact his (very) popular mandate.
What happened?
Not even a year later, the temporary alliance between the right-wing progressives and the conservative base has never been more tenuous. Everyone has rushed to their keyboards and microphones to prognosticate on what it means when the world’s richest man calls the world’s most powerful man a pedophile (and then deletes it a few days later) and promises to start a new political party (and then appears to walk back from that as well). As we sort through the debris from the weekend’s inter-coalitional ballistic exchanges, it looks like Elon has calmed down (or at least come down) and is now making moves toward de-escalation. Trump responded as expected, starting the exchange by giving as good as he got, but ultimately closed out the conflict in a manner closer to a magnanimous grandfather wanting the best for a prodigal son.
