Steve Bannon, former advisor to President-elect Donald Trump and a podcaster who calls his right-wing audience on “War Room” his “army of the awakened,” is determined to get billionaire and new Trump ally Elon Musk far away from the White House.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Bannon said that he’ll get it done before the president-elect takes office in just over a week. “I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time he’s inaugurated,” Bannon told the outlet. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”
Bannon did not respond to an email from Vanity Fair asking how he plans to oust Musk.
The pair have been dueling over what the future of the Make America Great Again strategy ought to look like—and who should be let into that movement’s ranks and the country’s borders. Bannon, and some other staunchly anti-immigration MAGA talking heads like Laura Loomer, are against the highly coveted H-1B visa program—which allows employers to hire foreign workers “in specialty occupations or as fashion models.” Specialty occupations require the visa applicant to have at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent, per the Department of Labor. This kind of visa often goes to workers in fields such as math, engineering, and technology.
Enter Musk—the richest man in the world who also happens to be the CEO of multiple companies in these fields, and who himself came to the US as an international student and says he worked using an H-1B visa. (According to reporting from Forbes based on H-1B data from fiscal year 2024, Tesla, which Musk runs, “was among the leading employers of new foreign-born scientists and engineers.”)
“The reason I’m in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong, is because of H1B,” Musk wrote on X, his social media platform, in late December. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he continued, “I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
In tandem with railing against the program’s detractors, Musk also said the visa system could use “major reform” and was “broken.”
That week on War Room, Bannon called Musk a MAGA “convert” and told him to “sit in the back and study.”
“We love converts,” Bannon said. “But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.”
“Don’t come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be,” Bannon continued. “If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.”
Trump, who in 2020 referred to the H-1B visa program as “very bad for workers” and said that “we should end it,” sided with Musk. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the New York Post’s Jon Levine in December.
The visa debate was one of the latest examples of MAGA infighting, fueled by conflicting ideas about what it means to be a Trump supporter and ally going into his second term. On one side, there’s Musk, who has become increasingly influential to the president-elect and gave over a quarter billion dollars to political action committees that backed Trump in the final months of the campaign. On the other, there’s old-guard MAGA—including people like Bannon, who was pardoned by Trump in 2021 for allegedly defrauding Americans who chipped in to “Build the Wall.”
Musk acknowledged this divide in December when he responded to a post on X that wrote of “two factions,” the “tech right and right right.”
The tech right, the account wrote, using a slur to describe people with intellectual disabilities, “is like “hey we need h-1b visa people to do the jobs,” and the right right was like “no you need to hire americans,” and the tech right is like “but you guys are retarded,” and the right right is like “well you don’t train us,” and the tech right is like “you can’t outtrain being retarded,” and while all this was going on we learned some people *really* don’t like Indians.”
“That pretty much sums it up. This was eye-opening,” Musk responded.
Bannon referenced the post in his recent interview with the Italian newspaper. “He suffered a major defeat in America on H1B visas, he derided our movement as ‘racist and [slur],’ and he lost,” he said, saying that Musk “has the maturity of a child. He has tried to change the conversation, after losing credibility in the United States and the fact that, frankly, people around Trump are tired of him.”
“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” Bannon added. “I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”
After Trump left the White House in 2021, Bannon was convicted of contempt for defying a congressional subpoena from the January 6 House committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol. He was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $6,500. He was released in October 2024, and on his first day out of federal prison, Bannon was back to stumping for Trump in the media and on War Room.
While Bannon is prophesying about the next Trump administration with confidence now, the pair’s relationship—like many between the former president and the people currently supporting him—hasn’t always been rosy.
Bannon was a key architect of Trump’s first win and a close advisor to the president in the early days of his tenure—until the pair began to clash and Bannon left the White House. In 2018, when Bannon was quoted in a book talking negatively about the then-president, Trump said he’d “lost his mind.”
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump wrote at the time. “Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well.”
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