Donald Trump’s insistence that America doesn’t have talented workers drew angry blowback from his own MAGA supporters.
The backlash exploded after Fox News host Laura Ingraham and the president clashed over work visas.
She suggested that H-1B or ‘talent’ visas for highly qualified migrants remain an obstacle to increased wages for domestic workers. And Trump insisted the visa program was still needed.
“Well, I agree, but you do also have to bring in talent…” the president said. Ingraham shot back, “We have plenty of talented people here!”
“No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You don’t have, you don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn!” Trump replied. “You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say I’m gonna put you into a factory where we’re gonna make missiles.”
MAGA’s online backlash was swift and fierce. “I believe in the American people. I am one of you. I believe you are good, talented, creative, intelligent, hard working, and want to achieve. I am solidly against you being replaced by foreign labor, like with H1B,” renegade Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene raged in an X post. “I am America First and America Only. This is my way and there is no other way to be.”
Logan Hall, a digital strategist for far-right Blaze Media, raged, “I’m sorry but what the f--k is this? American talent split the atom and went to the moon. American talent built everything the modern world takes for granted now. Give me a break. This is insanity.”
“Trump hates America and Americans,” Kevin Bass, an otherwise pro-MAGA contributor at the New York Post and Newsweek, wrote. “This is the only explanation I can come up with for this pattern of behaviour. He wants to import the third world to take Americans’ jobs.”
Others sought to paint outcry over Trump’s comments as symptomatic of his administration’s performance more broadly.
“This is insane—we’re going to lose the mid-terms so badly,” Anthony Sabatini, a GOP county commissioner in Lake County, Florida, wrote. “We’ve never seen an administration crash & burn in its first year so badly—for no reason other than to appease donors and special interests.”
The Trump administration is still reeling from a disastrous series of electoral performances across the country last week, which notably included Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race and gubernatorial wins for Democratic candidates in New Jersey and Virginia.
Polls earlier this month put Trump’s overall disapproval rating at 63 percent, the highest of either of his terms and one point higher, even, that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in 2021.
More than half blame the GOP for the devastating government shutdown, thought to have cost the U.S. economy up to $14 billion for each week it’s lasted. A new poll showed an eight-point lead among voters who say they’d go blue in next year’s election battles.
Trump, in his sitdown with Fox News on Tuesday, also referred to a September raid carried out by ICE agents at a Hyundai manufacturing plant in Georgia, described as the largest single-site immigration enforcement action in U.S. history.
“They had people from South Korea that made batteries all their lives,” Trump said. “Making batteries are [sic] very complicated, it’s not an easy thing. It’s very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems.”
“You can’t just say, a country’s coming in, gonna invest ten billion dollars to build a plant, and take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years, and they’re gonna start making missiles,” he went on. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Many of those detained during the raid on the Hyundai plant not only held valid visas, but were legally working in the country to install and train on sophisticated equipment. The incident, which was otherwise very much in line with the president’s ongoing nationwide deportation drive, met with intense diplomatic backlash. The South Korean president warned it would likely damage future investment in the U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing sector.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on the backlash.
