MAGA hardliners on Monday intensified their feud with Elon Musk over immigration policy, despite the Tesla mogul’s conciliatory gesture over the weekend. The harsh words against Mr. Musk deepened the disagreement between two factions of fervent Trump supporters over whether the looming crackdown on immigration should apply to high-skilled tech workers. 

Mr. Musk and his co-commissioner for the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, kicked off the controversy on Christmas Day, when the latter described American culture itself as unproductive and distracting from economic success — and expressed support for the H-1B visa for skilled technology workers, most of whom come from India and China. 

After a days-long, often emotional fight with detractors, Mr. Musk’s criticisms of President Trump’s most dedicated supporters escalated to him telling the president-elect’s backers to “take a big step back and F–K YOURSELF in the face.” He also said anyone criticizing him or his stance on work visas would be ripped “root and stem” from the GOP. 

Opponents of the H-1B visa program argue that it depresses American wages, and encourages tech companies to go searching overseas for those immigrants who are willing to work longer hours for less pay, while also being unable to leave their companies without fear of deportation. 

This weekend, Mr. Musk held out an olive branch, saying that to encourage domestic hiring, there should be fees attached to hiring foreign tech employees. 

“Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically,” Mr. Musk wrote. “I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.”

His attempt at conciliation did little to dispel the anger of his critics. 

The most ardent pushback to Mr. Musk came from Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, who has been running his immensely popular “War Room” daily podcast since being released in late October from prison, where he served a brief sentence for initially resisting a subpoena from the Select Committee on January 6. 

On December 27, Mr. Bannon called Mr. Musk a “toddler” for his meltdown over the work visas and the billionaire’s insistence that immigration restrictionists “F–K YOURSELF in the face.”

“Someone please notify ‘Child Protective Services’ — need to do a wellness check on this toddler,” Mr. Bannon wrote in response to Mr. Musk on the social media platform GETTR.

On Monday, Mr. Bannon reiterated those criticisms on his “War Room” podcast. 

“Here’s our position: the program completely goes away. All of it,” Mr. Bannon said on Monday of the H-1B visa program. “And instead of Elon, you saying we’re racist and you’re gonna get us root and stem out of the Republican Party — not on your best day.”

Mr. Bannon took further aim at Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy, and their friend David Sacks, a longtime Silicon Valley investor who will serve in a senior position in the second Trump White House. 

“When the enemy retreats, pursue,” Mr. Bannon said on Monday. “You don’t sit there and go, ‘let’s go to the negotiating table.’ They collapse.” Mr. Bannon went on to say the Silicon Valley titans now surrounding Trump are hypocrites for chanting “America First” during election season only to turn around and import “slave labor.”

Another influential Trump ally, Charlie Kirk, said on Monday that he agrees with some of Mr. Musk’s “premises” of importing more high-skilled labor, but that the H-1B program is still a threat to the America First movement. 

“Americans come first. America is for Americans only,” Mr. Kirk said. “If we’re gonna have legal immigration, it should benefit the homeland.”

The president-elect and other elected Republicans, however, have sided with Mr. Musk and his cohort. Trump told the New York Post in an interview that he loved the H-1B visa program, even though he ran against them in 2016 and signed an executive order in 2020 aimed at reducing the number of tech workers that industry imported from overseas. Congressman Mike Lawler similarly backed the program in an interview with ABC News on Sunday, saying that the visas are “critical to our economy.”