I want to pass on the first few paragraphs from Chaffin and Elinson's piece in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, which give a juicy summary of warring camps in MAGA world:
When President Trump announced last month that he would upend decades of American trade policy by imposing massive tariffs even on longtime allies, he aroused the competing spirits of his closest advisers. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was all too aware of the disruption tariffs would pose to his electric vehicle company, Tesla, with factories and suppliers around the world. He blasted Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, as “a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”
Vice President JD Vance, on the other hand, is an ardent defender of a trade policy that Trump insists will restore industrial jobs to the Rust Belt, including Vance’s home state of Ohio. “What has the globalist economy gotten the United States of America?” he asked on Fox News last month.
“We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity.”
Within that clash were strains of two radical and conflicting philosophies that have animated Trump’s first 100 days. On one side are tech bros racing to create a new future; on the other, a resurgent band of conservative Catholics who yearn for an imagined past. Both groups agree that the status quo has failed America and must be torn down to make way for a new “postliberal” world. This conviction explains much of the revolutionary fervor of Trump’s second term, especially the aggressive bludgeoning of elite universities and the federal workforce.
But the two camps disagree sharply on why liberalism should be junked and what should replace it. The techies envision a libertarian world in which great men like Musk can build a utopian future unfettered by government bureaucrats and regulation. Their dark prince is Curtis Yarvin, a blogger-philosopher who has called for American democracy to be replaced by a king who would run the nation like a tech CEO.
The conservative Catholics, in contrast, want to return America to a bygone era. They venerate local communities, small producers and those who work with their hands. This “common good” conservatism, as they call it, is bound together by tradition and religious morality. Unlike Musk, with his many baby mamas and his zeal to colonize Mars, they believe in limits and personal restraint.
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