Maga world against Trump, challenged over inflation, visas for skilled workers and Syria
Why the party's right-wing base is unhappy with its president's performance
In a recent interview with Fox news' Laura Ingraham, US President Donald Trump defended visas for skilled workers. "You also have to attract talent," Trump said. "We have a lot of talented people here," Ingraham responded. "No, you don't, no, you don't," Trump replied, prompting Ingraham to insist on having talented American workers at home. "You don't have specific talents and people have to learn. You can't take a person off the unemployment list and say, 'I'm going to put you in a factory and you're going to build missiles,'" Trump said.
The US president's statements are astonishing considering that only last September he signed an executive order that increased the H-1B visa application fee for skilled workers to $100,000, up from the $2,000 to $5,000 paid before. Statements that triggered criticism and indignation on social networks in the Maga (acronym for Make America Great Again) world, with right-wing activists speaking of the president's 'madness' and predicting more election defeats after those of early November. Steve Bannon, Trump's former strategist and a voice close to the Maga movement, blurted out in his War Room podcast: 'I think we have enough people, until everyone has a high-paying, high-value job'.
Never mind that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the president's position by citing industries such as shipbuilding and semiconductors. "An American can't get that job because in the United States we haven't built ships in years, we don't build semiconductors, so this idea of foreign partners coming in, teaching American workers and then going home, that's a success," Bessent told Fox News. It doesn't matter what Bessent says because the Maga are disgruntled and visas for skilled workers, a tool defended at the time by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are just an argument against the work of the president they helped get re-elected.
Not only on skilled workers but also on foreign students Trump surprised his base. After engaging in a fight with Ivy League universities and particularly against Harvard, the president gives unsettling answers in the same interview with Igraham that introduces a topic dear to MAGA: China and its growing presence in the US. "People are not enthusiastic about the idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States," the reporter notes. "She said that up to 600,000 Chinese students could come to the US. Why is it that when so many American kids want to go to school, instead these universities are getting rich on Chinese money?" Trump simply responds by saying he wants to "get along with the world" and points out that the US has "a huge system of colleges and universities".
Another reason for dissatisfaction is the cost of living, that inflation which propelled Trump back to the White House and which was supposed to be at the top of the president's concerns, is not a solved problem. It is not just a matter of polls that see The Donald slipping to 43% support versus 54% against (Realclearpolitics.com data). Some supporters of the Maga world are openly saying that Trump's insistence that the cost of living is falling makes no sense. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican from Georgia, a former presidential loyalist who is now disillusioned with her party and Trump on a number of issues, disputed the tycoon's narrative, stating in an interview with CNN that "affordability is a problem." "I go grocery shopping myself," he said. "Food prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington, D.C., in my flat, and they're also higher at my home in Rome, Georgia, higher than they were a year ago."
