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Mike Johnson Gets More Terrible News as Republican Skepticism Grows

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Donald Trump has two words for his controversial Cabinet nominees: Be quiet.

The president-elect’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, issued a frank missive to Trump’s nominees on Sunday, warning the cohort to tone down their social media activity ahead of their Senate confirmation hearings.



“While this instruction has been delivered previously, I am reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself,” Wiles wrote in a memo obtained by the New York Post.

“Accordingly, all intended nominees should refrain from any public social media posts without prior approval of the incoming White House counsel,” she continued.

Wiles—dubbed the “Ice Maiden”—did not specify in her memo if she was responding to any singular incident. But one Trump transition source told the Post it wasn’t related to the heated debate between the “tech-right” and far-right factions of Trump’s base over H-1B visas.



Incoming Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, co-chairs, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have found themselves at the epicenter of a digital brawl over their ardent defense of the work visa program. Last week, Musk claimed that H-1B visas offer a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S. Far-right opponents of immigration—and Musk’s position—claim the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies from hiring American labor.

The H-1B visa program has an annual cap set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to data from the American Immigration Council.

Republicans are in a tight position to push Trump’s controversial picks through the Senate process. Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch.

Some of Trump’s more contentious Cabinet picks—such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard—have noticeably quieted their social media presence since Christmas.

The German government has accused Elon Musk of using his platform X to influence their election.

“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” German government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann told reporters on Monday. She added that Musk is free to opine on German politics: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense.”

“Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose,” Musk said in response on X, referring to current German chancellor and center-left Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.

Musk has been making his support for Germany’s right-wing, anti-migration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party clear for weeks. Earlier this month, the billionaire wrote, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Last week, he wrote an opinion column in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper endorsing the party, calling it the “last spark of hope.”

“The AfD, even though it is described as far-right, represents a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment,” Musk wrote. “Portraying the AfD as far-right is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!”

The paper’s head opinions editor resigned after this was published.

Musk was also extremely influential as an advocate for President-elect Donald Trump this election cycle, and will likely continue to be as he co-leads DOGE with Vivek Ramaswamy.

As for Germany, the results of his meddling are still unknown. Their election will be held on February 23, 2025.

Steve Bannon thinks that Americans deserve reparations for having to coexist with immigrants on H-1B visas.

“We haven’t fought these battles over years and years and years to allow American citizens of every race, ethnicity, religion, be gutted by the sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley,” Bannon opined on his War Room show Monday morning. “David Sacks, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk … there’s no reform. We want it gone.… We want reparations for the tech workers that you stole their lives.”

This is another installment in the current schism between the “America First” MAGA faithful and the tech-world MAGA plutocrats who want more high-skilled immigrants. Former presidential candidate and current DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy started the fire last week by declaring, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” asserting that it was American culture that was leading CEOs to look elsewhere for labor. This talking point was parroted by Elon Musk and other right-wing techies, inviting a MAGA backlash that even included Nikki Haley, the torchbearer of the old GOP establishment who was vanquished by Trump earlier this year.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote. “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.”

This anti-H-1B energy has culminated in Bannon’s calls for reparations, something usually invoked for African Americans historically disenfranchised by slavery and racism.

“We’re gonna get H-1B visas out, root and stem, and all the workers you brought in. Just like we’re deporting 15 million here, we want them deported, out,” Bannon said later in his show. “And give those jobs to American citizens today … we demand they get reparations. You stole from them.”

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