ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
The MAGA Coalition is big and broad. There are purely capitalist factions, and there are groups who are anti big business. There are people who are more than happy with what Elon Musk and his DOGE crew are doing, upending the federal government. And then there's Sohrab Ahmari. He's a writer who comes from the perspective of the populist right. He's the U.S. editor of the website UnHerd - that's H-E-R-D - where he published a piece this week headlined "Elon Musk Is A Danger To Trumpism." And he joins us now. Hey, Sohrab.
SOHRAB AHMARI: Good to be with you, Andrew.
LIMBONG: So I don't want to put you in a box or anything, but I do want listeners to understand where you're coming from, so feel free to stop me if I say anything wrong here. You're a fan of President Trump in as much as he'd undo the neoliberal model - right? - of, say, like, the Clinton, Obama era. Now, as you saw Elon Musk make his moves attempting to sort of call the federal government, when did you start to get concerned?
AHMARI: Well, it was before the election, actually. I began to observe, like other people, Elon Musk's influence on then - then-President, too, but then-candidate Trump, especially there was an exchange in which the two of them were on an X, or formerly Twitter, Space at which President Trump praised Elon for firing workers who speak up at work or try to exert collective action. And so I wrote a column for the New Statesman in which I said Trump will have to choose between Elon Musk and populism. So what I think of as populism is just the recognition that ordinary people's problems have structural causes that have, in part, to do with the class structure.
LIMBONG: Yeah. And then when - as he came into office again, you had sort of, like, your fears reinforced, I imagine?
AHMARI: Correct. By the way, there are other things that I was very much pleased about and have said so, as well.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
AHMARI: I try to call balls and strikes. So for example, President Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Labor, Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is very well liked by organized labor, which I care about, and received praise for that. She's sponsored the PRO Act, which is the labor movement's No. 1 legislative priority. But the fact that Elon Musk is so close to all these processes raises questions of self-dealing again because obviously, Elon Musk before the election launched a lawsuit trying to challenge the very constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board and, therefore, the National Labor Relations Act, our fundamental labor law that upholds collective bargaining and has since 1937. So it's troubling that someone who has an imminent, you know, pecuniary interest is the person pushing them forward. It, again, raises questions of self-dealing.
LIMBONG: Yeah, you write in your piece of the - of both the CFPB and the NLRB that, quote, "trashing these agencies would do nothing to address the structural power imbalances which bedevil Trumpian America and which compelled it to vote for him in the first place. On the contrary, it would exacerbate the imbalances." Can you tell me a little bit more about those structural power imbalances?
AHMARI: Yeah, of course. I mean, in the case of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, It involves customers being debanked based on their political views. Just before leaving, Rohit Chopra, the - President Biden's now-ousted director of the CFPB, issued a proposed rule that would ban banks and other actors in the financial system from debanking customers based on their views. Most of the victims of debanking have been people who come from the right. So for example, an evangelical crowdfunding site was booted from PayPal because it was raising funds for January 6 defendants. It was a very kind of an outstretched hand, let's say, to the populist right. However, Elon Musk said delete CFPB, and now it's been deleted. So if you wanted to stop debanking...
LIMBONG: That would have been your way to do it.
AHMARI: You need someone like - that...
LIMBONG: Yeah.
AHMARI: ...Would have been a winner. Yeah.
LIMBONG: That would have been - you know, there are populist leftists, say, like the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party or even people who are just fans of Lina Khan - right? - the former FTC chair, who was pretty aggressive towards big tech. And those people might be banging their heads against the wall listening to this - right? - shouting at the radio because, like, of course President Trump was going to hand power over to, like, the rich and powerful. All the signs were there. What would you say to at?
AHMARI: Well, I don't think that's true. I think the battle for the Trump - inside the Trump administration is very much up for grabs between, you know, the two major factions, the populists and the techno libertarian wing, let's say, led by Elon Musk. And the battle lines were drawn even before the inauguration. So for example, over at the issue of guest worker programs, which are a kind of indentured servitude - speaking of Bernie Sanders, he opposed them strenuously and has continued to do so even as he's taken a softer line on immigration.
So in this battle, today, again, you find - on the same side, you find the Bernie types and the Steve Bannon types on the one hand, and Elon Musk and other techno libertarian types who want cheap tech labor, right? And H1-B - the H1-B program is very useful for that because not only can you pay workers less, but those are workers whose ability to stay in the country is dependent on one employer. So it leaves them with almost no bargaining power. You know, that battle is ongoing.
LIMBONG: What do you think it would take to get those other factions to, you know, read this piece and be like, maybe he's onto something?
AHMARI: The way I see it is the great danger is this - is that, you know, Elon Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. You know, for example, if Elon begins to claim that there is a gazillion dollars of waste in Social Security and Medicare and begins a kind of effective means testing where you have to sign up every year again and you have to be kind of qualify, which is an effective cut into the program - and if this, God forbid, happens against the backdrop of an economic downturn, that would be pretty dangerous for the right in 2026 and 2028.
LIMBONG: You can read Sohrab Ahmari's piece on UnHerd. It's titled "Elon Musk Is A Danger To Trumpism." Sohrab, thank you so much.
AHMARI: Yeah, thanks for having me, Andrew.
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