Loomer Slams ‘Welfare Queen’ Musk in Surging MAGA Civil War

Grace Harrington
·2-min read
Laura Loomer is suing Bill Maher for defamation for suggesting she slept with Donald Trump.
Stephanie Keith / Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

The civil war between Donald Trump’s billionaire tech bro backers and everyday MAGA loyalists ramped up on Monday after Trump ally Laura Loomer called Elon Musk a “welfare queen.”

“What is it going to mean for the future of our country, our national security and the incoming Trump administration if we have a bunch of technocrats, who are also essentially welfare queens because their companies are receiving government subsidies, and they want to take over our defense industry?” Loomer said to Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast.

The “welfare queen” quickly became a Republican bogeyman after Ronald Reagan frequently spoke of a woman who defrauded the government for hundreds of thousands of dollars during his 1976 presidential campaign.

While stats on government fraud are notoriously unclear, Musk has enjoyed billions of dollars of subsidies for his companies, Space X and Tesla.

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USA Today estimates that Musk has received around $20 billion over the past 16 years, according to federal contracting data.

Trump’s coalition fractured last week during a debate on H-1B visas, which allow companies to hire foreign workers for specialized occupations.

Two Silicon Valley bros turned Trump allies, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, came out swinging in support of the visas.

Musk said he would “go to war” on immigration and told one MAGA critic to go “F–K YOURSELF in the face.” Ramaswamy said the country needs foreign workers because American culture has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

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This sparked the ire of the America First diehards like Loomer and Bannon, two major MAGA mouthpieces who were quick to turn on Musk.

“We see that Elon Musk is having these off the book meetings with Iranian officials, Chinese officials. What does that mean for us, and the future of our constitutional republic?” Loomer said.

For his part, Trump took the side of his billionaire backers, though he has been a critic of the visa program in the past.

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” Trump told the New York Post on Saturday.

Bannon said on War Room Monday that foreign workers should be deported and Americans should receive “reparations” for having to compete with them for jobs. Bannon added that billionaires like Musk and David Sacks “are just coming to the party” and their ideas are “not MAGA economics, not America First economics.”

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