Trump’s DOGE Guy Sparks MAGA Civil War With Slam on American Culture

That’s one way to tick off your supporters.

Donald Trump’s DOGE appointee Vivek Ramaswamy set MAGA social media alight Thursday after he called U.S. culture “mediocre” in a screed that disparaged prom queens, high school jocks, and even “Saturday morning cartoons.”

The controversial post came amid debate on whether the U.S. should continue approving H-1B visas to foreign workers or not. Ramaswamy made clear he favors the program, concluding modern day Americans simply aren’t focussed enough to create the world’s best engineers.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer),” he wrote. “That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.”

Ramaswamy continued: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”

The long post has some notable parallels to Ramaswamy’s personal biography. He was the valedictorian of his elite Jesuit high school, St. Xavier in Cincinnati, Ohio; is the son of Indian-born immigrants who, he has pointed out, entered legally on work visas; and appears to have named a series of shows from his ’90s childhood.

That wasn’t all. The 39-year-old failed presidential candidate, who’s recently been tasked to work with Elon Musk to cut government spending once Trump returns to the White House, said Americans need to turn off Friends and watch more movies like the 2014 drama Whiplash.

Ramaswamy added that kids need to stop hanging out at malls and say goodbye to sleepovers. Instead, he believes they need to stick to reading and having weekend science competitions. (His own parents had a windowless study in the basement for him, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported.)

He said fixing these supposed societal failures could be America’s “Sputnik moment”; a turning point for U.S. society.

“We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again,” he wrote. “Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.”

Ramaswamy’s message that the real problem DOGE needs to solve is America itself wasn’t embraced by many on the right, however, including a swath of the MAGA world’s most popular influencers.

Rogan O’Handley, who runs the pro-Trump X account “DC Draino,” posted to his 2 million followers that Ramaswamy needs to “back the truck up here” and “get back to the main mission” of cutting federal spending and regulation—not telling parents how to parent.

“How did DOGE go from ‘let’s cut wasteful government spending’ to ‘here’s why we need to import more immigrants’ almost overnight? ” O’Handley posted. “What’s next? Gun control? No more oil drilling?”

Countless conservatives shared O’Handley’s sentiment. Among those was Nikki Haley, who campaigned against Ramaswamy when they both sought to unseat Trump during the GOP’s presidential primaries.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” she responded to Ramaswamy. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

The right-wing media personality Mike Cernovich also responded to Ramaswamy’s post, writing, “The Woodstock generation managed to build out aerospace, the one before went to the moon, America was doing great. Underlying your post is that we were all living in squalor until being rescued by H-1B’s. Then why did everyone want to come here?”

Ramaswamy wrote back: “That version of America, the one that used to embody unbridled exceptionalism, is exactly what we want to return to. That’s a point about culture, not immigration policy.”

Another popular post about Ramaswamy that received over 10,000 likes read, “Vivek is tweeting about how we need Asian immigrants because Americans are bad parents who raise dumb kids, and I’m not sure this guy has a big future in Republican politics.”

Ramaswamy has publicly sided with Trump’s mass deportations and the ending of birthright citizenship.

When it comes to hiring practices in tech, however, Ramaswamy—like Musk—appears sympathetic to immigrants and foreign workers, which made up nearly 20 percent of the overall STEM workforce in 2021.

Musk, 53, has also angered some Trump supporters with posts that called out Americans as lazy—though, none of his posts garnered as much outrage as what Ramaswamy’s did.

“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” Musk wrote on Wednesday. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”

Musk, a South African who was a H1-B recipient himself at one point, came to his DOGE partner’s defense on Thursday. He wrote on X that the “number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.”

“Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be,” Musk said. “That enables the whole TEAM to win.”

Ramaswamy’s long post was not the only seasonal suggestion that MAGA is more fissiparous than the united movement portrayed by Trump. Musk, his fellow DOGE appointee opened a rift with RFK Jr. over whether to use slimming drugs; Musk is a proud Mounjaro-using advocate and the Kennedy scion is “lifestyle first.” Where Ramaswamy stands on the Ozempic ideological divide has yet to be ascertained.