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 this is God's grace to our country, giving us another chance to fight and prosper," Kirk, director of the conservative youth outreach group Turning Point USA, said to the cheers of hundreds of MAGA loyalists said. Came out to his pre-inauguration ball. "What we are about to experience is a new golden age, a renaissance of America."

Celebrations continued as Donald Trump returned to the White House, signing a series of executive orders to fulfill his campaign promises. But this might be the best mood the MAGA world has been in a while. The president's coalition is divided into two distinct but overlapping factions, both of which are destined for infighting. On one side are the far-right nationalists and reactionaries who have supported Trump since he came off the golden escalator. These include Stephen Miller, seen as the chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and former executive chairman of the American Immigration Foundation . 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. The groups are already clashing over key aspects of Trump's immigration crackdown. Not everyone will win in Trump's second term.

During the campaign, the two groups easily aligned on their goal of electing Trump. Members of the nationalist faction are pleased with how Musk promotes their ideology on X, the social platform he owns. Musk, who has more than 200 million followers, 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 relishes attacks on DEI efforts in the workplace, which allow them to more easily change hiring practices against the wishes of more liberal employees.

But the two groups also want different things. The nationalist right wants an economy that prioritizes and helps American-born families (especially traditional nuclear families), sometimes at the expense of business interests; the tech right wants to deregulate the economy to make it more profitable. The nationalist right wants to block almost all immigration; the tech right wants to bring in migrant workers wherever they want. The nationalist right wants to return the United States to what they see as a pre-Internet era of stability and prosperity; the tech right wants to usher in a bold, globally oriented new economy.

Cracks are already starting to show. In December, Trump selected Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an artificial intelligence adviser, sparking a bitter and very public dispute between the two camps over visas for high-skilled immigrants. (“Fuck your own face,” Musk once told critics on the right.) At the time, I thought MAGA’s honeymoon was over. The divisions will only intensify. Last week, after former President Joe Biden warned of the influence of Silicon Valley oligarchs and the “tech industrial complex” in his farewell address, white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes posted on X that “Biden is right ". Bannon has been particularly unyielding: In early January, he told an Italian newspaper that Musk was a "truly evil person" and said he would "kick the billionaire out" of Trump's orbit before Inauguration Day . (Given that Musk will reportedly open an office in the West Wing, Bannon doesn’t seem to have succeeded in making that happen.) In an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, Bannon put these tech The titan describes Trump as someone he considers a "nerd." Very shameful. Bannon said seeing them on Inauguration Day was "like walking into Teddy Roosevelt's cabin and seeing the heads of all the large animals he photographed."

In a sense, he's right. During the inauguration, tech billionaires — including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook - sitting directly behind Trump's family on the podium. They don't all support Trump as strongly as Musk, but they ingratiate themselves with the president by dining with him at Mar-a-Lago and donating millions of dollars to his first fund, sometimes from their personal bank accounts , and others in the companies they lead).

By doing so, they got his ear and can now influence the president in ways that may not be consistent with the priorities of the nationalist right. On Monday, at the White House's first news conference of the term, Trump defended the H-1B visa program: "We want talented people coming into our country," he said. Bannon later responded on his podcast, lamenting the "techno-feudalists" Trump was apparently listening to.

The two factions still have overlapping interests. They are both fed up with a country that they see as increasingly weak and overly considerate of the needs of the vulnerable at the expense of the most productive. As Zuckerberg recently said, America lacks "masculine energy." Some members of both camps appear interested in trying to reconcile their differences, or at least not inflame them further. On the eve of the inauguration, just before the Turning Point America ball, right-wing publisher Passage Publishing hosted its own ball in Washington, an event designed to be a night where "MAGA meets the tech right." Jonathan Keeperman, head of Passage Publishing, has always been keen on playing the role of peacemaker. Last month, he joined Kirk's podcast and tried to frame the visa debate as one where his reactionary nativist right could find common cause with the tech right. Silicon Valley can "win the AI ​​arms race" by limiting immigration and "nurturing our home-born" STEM talent, he said.

Kirk can't hide his dissatisfaction with the technological elite. “Big Tech censors us, slanders us, and treats us badly,” he said. "Why should we satisfy their policy wishes?" It's easy to imagine Musk asking the same question. He and his colleagues run some of the most powerful companies in the world. They're not going to give up on this because a handful of people on the platform they have tell them to. Both parties are determined about what they want and will not give in easily.

We can already guess how this will end. During his first administration, Trump ultimately sided with the wealthy despite the populist promises he made on the campaign trail. Bannon was Trump's chief strategist at the start of his first term, pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy. Trump fired him seven months into his presidency and then began passing a tax cut bill. The nationalist right is sure to gain ground in his new administration — excited by Trump's moves around birthright citizenship and his promise to push for mass deportations. But if it conflicts with the wishes of Trump's wealthy advisers in the tech world, good luck with that.

Remember, it was Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk who sat on the podium at Trump’s inauguration. Bannon, the Guardians, and Kirk are nowhere to be seen.