Over the past decade, Steve Bannon, the veteran strategist and podcast host, has been a pugnacious ally of Donald Trump, revelling in the task of taking on what he views as the liberal elite.
But in the run-up to Trump’s inauguration for a second term on Monday, Bannon has been picking fights much closer to home — including an extraordinary bust-up with Elon Musk, the billionaire investor who has become one of the president-elect’s closest confidants.
An argument over visas for skilled workers has morphed into a much broader attack on Musk and other wealthy, libertarian technology executives who have grown close to Trump, but who Bannon fears are not sufficiently committed to the populist “Make America Great Again” agenda.
Musk has defended the so-called H-1B visas, which are used by lots of tech companies to bring in skilled workers, claiming: “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Last week, Bannon, who is critical of the visa programme, went so far as to describe Musk as “a truly evil guy” and pledged to “take this guy down”.
Speaking to the Financial Times before travelling to Washington for the inauguration, Bannon was more measured — but no less pointed in his critique. “These guys do not believe in the nation state, they believe in techno-feudalism,” he says. “That chasm is going to become a serious issue, between the populists and the ‘broligarchs’ going forward.”
Every new administration has big personalities vying for the ear of the president — and whose clashes sometimes become public. But the Bannon-Musk dispute highlights a crucial and complicated reality for Trump as he begins his second term.
While the incoming president enjoys stronger standing with the American public than at almost any time during his first term, he also has a much more diverse political coalition to satisfy. The Republican party may be united in its personal loyalty to Trump, but it is now made up of a number of factions that have very different world views and agendas.
When Trump entered office in 2017 on the back of a narrow election victory — he lost the popular vote by nearly 3mn votes — he was the leader of a party that was more unified around key objectives, even if there were tensions over economic policy.
His decisive victory in last year’s election was partly the result of support from pockets of American society that he had not captured before. This allowed him to win the popular vote and to secure Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.
The result of this political success, however, is that his base now stretches from libertarian-leaning technology executives such as Musk to lapsed Democrats sceptical of vaccines and ultra-processed foods like Robert F Kennedy Jr. He also won votes from low-income urban African-American and Hispanic voters angry about inflation.
In the background, the tensions between the business-friendly wing of the Republican party and the increasingly dominant populist faction, which were a feature of the first term, are now much sharper — as the fierce argument over H-1B visas has shown.
These factional disputes are likely to play out in almost all of the issues that the new administration is promising to address. And given their slim majorities in Congress — in the House of Representatives, the Republicans can only afford to lose two or three votes to pass legislation — every proposal will be a political battle.
“I’m not sure that he will actually be stronger institutionally once he’s in office,” says Lindsay Chervinsky, a political historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. “There are so many issues that people [in his camp] are going to be fundamentally and intractably in disagreement on.”
Even without these tensions, Trump’s in-tray would be formidable. As he is sworn in to be the 47th US president at the age of 78, Trump will have to deliver on lofty promises he made to quickly tame prices, end foreign conflicts ranging from Ukraine to the Middle East, and use mass deportations to eject millions of undocumented immigrants from the US.
Trump is expected to unleash a torrent of executive orders on his first day in office to reverse some of Joe Biden’s policies and introduce some new measures on trade and the southern border.
But internal frictions have started to bubble up as Trump prepares to make his first policy decisions — from how aggressively to pursue tariffs on both allies and adversaries to the details of his immigration crackdown, which spending programmes to slash, and the timing and details of the tax cuts he has pledged for both companies and individuals.
After Trump floated the idea of a temporary reprieve from the US ban on TikTok that took effect on Sunday, national security hawks in the party objected. “Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for an extension,” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, wrote on X.
People who have spoken directly to Republican lawmakers and incoming Trump administration officials say there are still big debates and huge uncertainty about the details of his earliest steps — as well as a growing recognition that it may take time to achieve their goals.
“Reality is going to hit the Trump agenda,” says one senior Republican lobbyist close to Trump’s team. “The system can only go so fast and so far.”
At Mar-a-Lago this month, Trump hosted groups of Republicans representing different wings of the party, including moderates and hardline conservatives, for different sessions designed to co-ordinate policy.
“He’s bringing all the factions together,” says Ralph Norman, a South Carolina lawmaker and member of the House Freedom Caucus, who made the trip to Florida this month. “The only disadvantage is he has a short timeframe to get things done.”
Bannon says Trump needs to capitalise on the political gains he has made over the past year with voters, including many who were previously in the Democratic camp.
“President Trump is the leader of this ever-expanding movement, now including Blacks and Hispanic working-class people,” he says. “He is seen as an agent of change — and they don’t want him to stop until there is real change.”
The evolution of Bannon’s stand-off with Musk could set the tone for the early part of Trump’s second term, and will say a lot about where power truly lies in the Maga universe.
“It’s like two giant rams butting heads, big strong rams,” the Republican lobbyist says. “Steve has certain beliefs. And he’s got a media platform, and he has listeners who subscribe to his vision of the world, which may not be Elon’s vision of the world.”
It also reflects a key contradiction at the heart of the incoming president’s now exuberant, revitalised political movement.
While Trump has increasingly picked up support from working-class voters, especially younger men, he has surrounded himself by billionaires, from Wall Street to Big Tech and Big Oil, who are more wary of populist economics, especially Trump’s universal across-the-board import levies and aggressive antitrust policies.
Many business leaders including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta have decided to embrace Trump rather than resist him, but those alliances could fray if Trump leans much more heavily on economic nationalism than expected.
On Sunday, Bannon blasted big technology groups for “trying to be supplicants” to Trump.
In Congress, the biggest discussions surround the passage of Trump’s tax and spending plans, including the extension of his 2017 tax cuts and the spending reductions that Musk is overseeing in partnership with Vivek Ramaswamy, as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Republican leaders in Congress have been canvassing opinion on Capitol Hill to find the near-unanimous support they need for Trump’s policies, given their very small majorities. But there is still no consensus on the best path.
Trump had asked for lawmakers to pass everything in a “big beautiful bill”, that would include tax cuts and immigration, but that idea has not gained much traction. Instead, there could be a series of smaller packages up for consideration instead.
The visit by Norman and the House Freedom Caucus to Mar-a-Lago was designed to ensure there are no defections from their end. If the most extreme conservatives believe the legislation will worsen America’s fiscal position or lacks key provisions they are campaigning for, they could throw a wrench into the process.
Yet there is also a group of moderate Republicans, some of them from swing districts and states, who often have a different agenda — and a lot of power to make or break Trump’s second presidency. Some are insisting, for instance, that he expand deductions on state and local taxes — a move that would be popular in suburban areas of large and often Democratic-controlled cities.
House Republicans are split on whether and how much of the tax cuts should be paid for, whether tariff revenue can be included as offsetting the cost, and to what extent the US can afford more rising deficits.
“I’ve been surprised by the disorganisation around the legislative strategy for 2025. I think it’s going to be harder to pass these laws than a lot of people here in town seem to think it will be,” says Michael Strain, an economic policy expert at American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think-tank.
While some Republicans are determined that any new tax and spending bill should be “deficit neutral”, he says, others are “quite comfortable with expanding the deficit by, you know, a few trillion dollars”.
“I think the coalition will be stressed. There’s already clear faultlines,” says Strain. “To continue to expand and grow, populism has to deliver results. And that doesn’t mean tax cuts for the wealthy, it means tax cuts for the little guy.”
On trade, Trump appears to be straddling several camps. In the run-up to the inauguration, he has continued to deliver tariff threats against friends and foes alike, and his chosen top officials include Republican China hawks, such as JD Vance, the incoming vice-president, and Marco Rubio, the nominee for secretary of state.
But more moderate figures with close knowledge of markets, such as Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick to be US Treasury secretary, and Kevin Hassett, the economist he chose to be director of the National Economic Council, are expected to play a countervailing force against any extreme policy lurches that could unsettle investors.
“Trump will not want to spoil his own parade by hurting markets on his first day,” says Andrew Bishop, global head of policy research at Signum Global Advisors, a consulting firm.
How quickly, on what products and from what nations Trump will launch his new wave of trade wars are still huge sources of uncertainty, even for Trump’s closest allies in Congress, suggesting that a plan has not been fully hatched yet and is still the subject of fierce internal debate.
But Trump does not seem to be planning merely incremental changes to trade policy: he said he would swiftly launch an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs. “We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
In his critique of the technology sector, Bannon believes the Trump administration should also pursue aggressive antitrust enforcement, which would be a continuation of the approach adopted by the Biden administration. But he fears this may be a losing battle: “I’m in the minority now, but I think Big Tech needs to be broken up — antitrust should be one of our leading efforts.”
Trump and his team have started to manage expectations about what can be achieved quickly, beyond the blizzard of executive actions that will accompany his oath of office on Monday.
His top migration advisers have made it clear that the deportation crackdown will start with undocumented convicted criminals, mainly those already serving prison time, avoiding any immediate disruption to communities and businesses.
Trump’s foreign policy team has also said the president is no longer expecting to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russia within 24 hours of his arrival at the White House — as he claimed during the campaign — but would like to see the launch of peace talks within three months instead. Trump’s top Middle Eastern advisers got a huge boost with the ceasefire and hostage deal that was reached in Gaza last week, but the region could still be volatile during his first year in office.
One big wild card is how far Trump will go in delivering his pledge to purge the civil service of his political opponents as well as his promise to overhaul the justice department.
Both are moves that would raise huge red flags about the rule of law and the health of American democracy, and could trigger new tensions among Republicans.
One particular theory is animating a lot of the discussion in Washington: that Trump actually has very little time to get things done. Although he won a comfortable election victory, political insiders believe his political capital will inevitably be limited by the fact that he cannot run for re-election in 2028.
That means the new administration cannot afford too many delays or mis-steps, and that the patience of voters will be limited if there is too much chaos or division.
Supporters of Trump believe his White House will be far more organised than it was in 2017, with Susie Wiles, his senior campaign manager and strategist, now becoming chief of staff.
But Trump is still prone to going off on tangents, speaking off the cuff and leading erratically. Earlier this month, he turned an announcement about investments into US data centres into a press conference devoted to his plans for US territorial expansion, from Greenland to Canada and the Panama Canal.
“He’s got more experience. He’s had more experienced people around him. He’s got a better gatekeeper,” says Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report. “All of those things theoretically could make this more predictable, but I don’t know that we could count on that.”
From a political perspective, the challenge for Trump will be to make sure the economic improvement he has promised to people’s lives begins to show quickly.
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist at Penta Group, the consultancy, says the “political allegiance” of Democrats and other swing voters, who crossed over to Trump’s side last year because of anxiety over inflation, is quite tenuous and could evaporate in short order.
“These voters are quite nomadic, and while they’re here today they could be gone tomorrow,” he says.
But Norman — who backed Nikki Haley in the presidential primary race — is still bullish on Trump’s capacity to deliver on his promises, despite the many rifts within the party.
“He is the right man at the right time with the right ideas. So no, I have no hesitancy,” he says. “We’ve just got to get as much [done] as we can while we can.”
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