On Sunday night, in the basement ballroom of the Salamander Hotel in Washington, D.C., Charlie Kirk was happier than I’d ever seen him. “I truly believe that this is God’s grace on our country, giving us another chance to fight and to flourish,” Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth-outreach organization, said to cheers from the hundreds of MAGA loyalists who had come out for his pre-inaugural ball. “What we are about to experience is a new golden era, an American renaissance.”

The celebrations have continued now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, as he has signed a flurry of executive orders to make good on his campaign promises. But this might be the best mood that MAGA world will be in for a while. The president’s coalition is split between two distinct but overlapping factions that are destined for infighting. On one side are the far-right nationalists and reactionaries who have stood by Trump since he descended down his golden escalator. Among them are Stephen Miller, who is seen as a chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the former executive chair of Breitbart News. On the other side is the tech right: Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who have become ardent supporters of the president. Already, these groups are butting heads on key aspects of Trump’s immigration crackdown. In Trump’s second term, not everyone can win.

During the campaign, it was easy for these two groups to be aligned in the goal of electing Trump. Members of the nationalist wing took glee in how Musk boosted their ideology on X, the social platform he owns. With his more than 200 million followers, Musk has helped spread far-right conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets. Meanwhile, the tech right has relished attacks on DEI efforts in the workplace—attacks that have allowed them to more easily walk back hiring practices, against the wishes of their more liberal employees.

But the two groups also want different things. The nationalist right wants an economy that prioritizes and assists American-born families (specifically, traditional nuclear ones), sometimes at the expense of business interests; the tech right wants a deregulated economy that bolsters its bottom line. The nationalist right wants to stop almost all immigration; the tech right wants to bring in immigrant workers as it pleases. The nationalist right wants to return America to a pre-internet era that it perceives as stable and prosperous; the tech right wants to usher in a bold, globally focused new economy.   

Already, the cracks have started to show. Last month, Trump’s pick of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser led to a bitter and very public spat between the two camps over visas for highly skilled immigrants. (“FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” Musk at one point told his critics on the right.) At the time, I argued that the MAGA honeymoon is over. The disagreements have only intensified. Last week, after former President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to warn about the influence of Silicon Valley oligarchs and the “tech industrial complex,” the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes posted on X that “Biden is right.” Bannon in particular has not relented: Earlier this month, he told an Italian newspaper that Musk is a “truly evil person” and that would get the billionaire “kicked out” of Trump’s orbit by Inauguration Day. (Considering that Musk is reportedly getting an office in the West Wing, Bannon does not seem to have been successful in that quest.) In an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, Bannon described the tech titans as “nerds” whom Trump was humiliating. Seeing them on Inauguration Day was “like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot,” Bannon said.

In a sense, he is right. During the inauguration ceremony, tech billionaires—including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—sat directly behind Trump’s family on the dais. They are not all as forcefully pro-Trump as Musk, but they have cozied up to the president by dining with him at Mar-a-Lago and making million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund (in some cases from their personal bank accounts, and in others from the corporations they head).

In doing so, they’ve gotten his ear and can now influence the president in ways that might not line up with the priorities of the nationalist right. On Monday, during his first press conference from the White House this term, Trump defended the H-1B visa program: “We want competent people coming into our country,” he said. Later, Bannon responded on his podcast, lamenting the “techno-feudalists” to whom Trump is apparently listening.

Both factions still have overlapping interests. They are both fed up with a country that they see as having grown weak and overly considerate to the needs of the vulnerable, at the expense of the most productive. America lacks a “masculine energy,” as Zuckerberg recently put it. Some members in both camps seem interested in trying to reconcile their differences, or at least in not driving the wedge further. On the eve of the inauguration, just before Turning Point USA’s ball, the right-wing publishing house Passage Publishing held its own ball in D.C.—an event intended to be a night when “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” The head of Passage Publishing, Jonathan Keeperman, has been keen on playing peacemaker. Last month, he went on Kirk’s podcast and tried to frame the debate over visas as one where his reactionary, nativist wing of the right could find common cause with the tech right. By limiting immigration and “developing our own native-born” STEM talent, he said, Silicon Valley can “win the AI arms race.”

Kirk couldn’t keep his frustration toward the tech elite from seeping out. “Big Tech has censored us and smeared us and treated us terribly,” he said. “Why would we then accommodate their policy wishes?” It’s easy to imagine Musk asking the same question. He and his peers run some of the most powerful companies in the world. They’re not going to give that up because a few  people, on the very platforms that they own, told them to. Each side is steadfast in what it wants, and won’t easily give in.

We already can guess how this will end. During his first administration, despite making populist promises on the campaign trail, Trump eventually sided with the wealthy. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during the start of his first term, pushed for tax hikes on the wealthy. Seven months into his presidency, Trump fired him, and then proceeded to pass tax cuts. In his new administration, the nationalist right will certainly make gains—it is thrilled with Trump’s moves around birthright citizenship and his pledge to push forward with mass deportations. But if it’s ever in conflict with what Trump’s rich advisers in the tech world want, good luck.

Remember, it was Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk who sat on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Bannon, Keeperman, and Kirk were nowhere in sight.

Government employees received emails threatening "consequences" if they did not report DEI work to the White House.

The US president has revoked a 1965 executive order, put federal DEI workers on leave and taken down diversity websites.

The end goal of the war against affirmative action is to return the US to a state of quasi-legal racial segregation.

We delve into the latest news and updates from the Trump administration.

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

Related:

Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message. Why 2025 is different from 2017

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s second term might have already peaked. The attack on birthright citizenship is a big test for the Constitution. You’re being alienated from your own attention, Chris Hayes writes.

Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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