Steve Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s former advisor who helped steer conservative media into the arms of the xenophobic far-right, has vowed to get Trump’s new favorite confidant booted from the White House orbit before next week’s inauguration.
“I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time he’s inaugurated,” Bannon told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”
Bannon, a former investment banker and one-time chair of Breitbart News, has clashed with Musk, the CEO of Tesla, in recent weeks as part of a bitter feud over H1-B visas for skilled immigrants.
Critics have argued the tech industry exploits the H1-B program to hire cheaper foreign labor. First generation MAGA hardliners like Bannon, who oversaw Breitbart’s nationalist transition into what he called “the platform for the alt-right,” have called for an end to the program.
Data uncovered by Bloomberg News last year showed middlemen outsourcing companies and IT staffing firms had cheated on a massive scale to get a larger share of the limited annual spaces available through the H1-B program, bringing in people with “less-remarkable resumes, paying them lower wages and heightening the risk of undercutting American labor.”
Musk, one of Trump’s second-generation tech bro backers, initially backed the program, but then softened his stance and conceded it is “broken.”
But not before he signaled his agreement with an X post that claimed Americans were too “retarded” to perform skilled jobs, which left a lasting sting for Bannon and others.
“He suffered a major defeat in America on H1B visas, he derided our movement as racist and retarded, and he lost,” added Bannon in the interview Wednesday. “He 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.”
Musk, the world’s richest man, essentially bought his way into the Trump circle, donating $277 million of his own money to the campaigns backing the president-elect and other Republicans, making him the largest donor in the 2024 election cycle.
“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” Bannon added of Musk. “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.”
