MAGA backlash as Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy defend visa program for skilled workers: Live updates
MAGA supporters clash with top Trump lieutenants as they laud the benefits of H-1B visa program for American companies
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Your support makes all the difference.Supporters of President-elect Donald Trump are bashing two of his top lieutenants, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy after they both defended a visa program for skilled workers.
Ramaswamy, who will lead the outside commission known as the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Musk, blamed a number of 1990s sitcoms for emphasizing the wrong values.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote in a post on X.
“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” Musk wrote on Wednesday on X. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”
The “number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he later added. “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
That triggered pushback on social media from pro-Trump users.
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As Trump returns to the White House, and Putin’s forces advance – what next for Ukraine in 2025?
After nearly three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the future of the country’s fight against Vladimir Putin’s forces is more uncertain than ever.
Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in the US presidential race, off the back of promises to end the war in eastern Europe in 24 hours, seemingly even if that means forcing Kyiv to cede territory to Russia, seems to spell the end of the West’s long-held policy of helping Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin’s forces entirely. Negotiations with Russia, after years of silence, are back on the agenda.
This is causing significant stress in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. As Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian opposition leader, puts it: “The world needs to understand how crucial it is not to end the war on any idea of negotiating with Russia.”
Read more:
As Trump returns to the White House – what next for Ukraine in 2025?
Ukraine is facing an array of issues heading into 2025, underscored by the anxiety of what the re-election of Donald Trump could mean for the country’s future. Tom Watling speaks to politicians, military experts and aid workers to discover what next year could look like
How Elon Musk’s influence has grown both online and offline in 2024
Elon Musk started 2024 as the controversial owner of a social media platform, but ends it as one of the most powerful individuals in the world and a key adviser to the incoming US president.
The debate around the billionaire has moved on dramatically over the last 12 months, from whether the way he was running X, formerly Twitter, would be viable or sustainable in the long-term, to whether Mr Musk’s own influence over global politics through his wealth and social media megaphone made him a threat to democracy.
The biggest story of 2024 around Mr Musk has been has dramatic swing behind the US President-elect Donald Trump ahead of the November election and how Mr Musk effectively reconfigured X into a vehicle to support the Republican candidate, alongside his personal fortune.
Read more:
How Elon Musk’s influence has grown both online and offline in 2024
The billionaire’s control of X, formerly Twitter, has helped him expand his impact offline over the last 12 months.
Russia warns ‘radical’ Donald Trump against resuming nuclear testing
Russia has warned it “rules out nothing” regarding nuclear testing in response to Donald Trump’s “radical” position on the issue during his first term as president.
Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, who oversees arms control, warned the United States that its nuclear arsenal is intended to “sober up” countries on the “brink of direct armed conflict” with Russia.
Russia, the US and China are all undertaking major modernisations of their nuclear weapons just as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of the Cold War era between the Soviet Union and the US is starting to fall apart.
Read more:
Russia warns ‘radical’ Donald Trump against resuming nuclear testing
Ministers warned the US that its nuclear arsenal is intended to ‘sober up’ countries on the ‘brink of direct armed conflict’ with Russia
Elon Musk reveals he’s taking drug for weight loss in bizarre ‘Ozempic Santa’ post
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and President-elect Donald Trump’s“first buddy,” revealed on Christmas night that he was using the medication Mounjaro for weight loss while dubbing himself “Ozempic Santa” in a holiday-themed social media post.
The revelation also comes just a couple of weeks after he clashed with Trump’s designated Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the widespread use and long-term benefits of GLP-1 inhibitors in battling obesity.
Posting to his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk shared an image of himself dressed as Santa Claus next to a Christmas tree alongside the caption “Ozempic Santa.” The post quickly went viral, gathering over 200,000 likes and 26 million views.
“Like Cocaine Bear, but Santa and Ozempic!” Musk added in a separate tweet.
Read more:
Elon Musk reveals he’s taking drug for weight loss in bizarre ‘Ozempic Santa’ post
The world’s richest man has clashed with incoming Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the role weight-loss medications should play in making Americans healthier and thinner.
Trump’s ‘border czar’ says migrant families will be put in detention centers once again
The Trump administration is planning to jail immigrant families together in detention centers before they are removed from the country.
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Tom Homan told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”
Trump and Homan have repeatedly said that even U.S. citizen children of non-citizen parents are expected to be deported along with their families.
“Here’s the issue,” Homan told The Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”
Trump’s border czar wants ‘family’ detention centers for deportation plans
Tom Homan says the administration will construct ‘family facilities’ for mass deportation plans, including removing citizen children with undocumented parents
ICYMI: Trump names nominee for Panama ambassador after suggesting U.S. would seize control of canal
Trump has nominated Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera for U.S. ambassador to Panama, “a Country that is ripping us off on the Panama Canal, far beyond their wildest dreams,” the president-elect Trump announced on Christmas Eve.
“Few understand Latin American politics as well as Kevin,” Trump said.
Cabrera also served as state director for Florida in Trump’s 2020 campaign and is vice chair of Miami-Dade’s International Trade Consortium.
His nomination follows a seemingly random attack suggesting that the U.S. would seize control of the Panama Canal, part of a series of statements aimed at other countries in a signal that his administration is threatening U.S. territorial expansion to bully sovereign nations to his economic demands.
Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino fired back, emphasizing the canal would remain under Panama’s control.
“The sovereignty and independence of our country is non-negotiable,” he said.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has some critics worried. Others are ready for a fight
Some of Donald Trump’s most prominent critics are bracing for impact.
“By going after me they’re just going to give me a platform,” George Conway told The Independent.
More from The Independent’s White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg on the critics preparing for a fight:
Donald Trump critics ready for his White House return and possible retribution
While some critics brace for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, others are ready for a fight.
ICYMI: Biden signed 50 bills into law on Christmas Eve
President Joe Biden spent Christmas Eve signing 50 bills into law, including one piece of legislation supported by Paris Hilton and another designating the bald eagle as the U.S. national bird.
Gustaf Kilander breaks them down:
Biden signs 50 bills into law - including and Paris Hilton-backed legislation
The Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act is designed to hold teenage treatment centers and care facilities accountable
ICYMI: Nation’s largest Latino civil rights group blasts Republican figure’s viral ‘execution’ video
A video from aspiring Republican political figure Valentina Gomez shows her firing a handgun into the back of the head of a dummy tied to a chair with a black bag over its head.
“It’s that simple, public executions for any illegal that rapes or kills an American. They don’t deserve deportation, they deserve to be ended,” she says.
The widely derided video has been condemned for glorifying “the type of vigilantism that has led to deadly consequences in our nation and feeds into the anti-immigrant lie,” according to League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights group.
“LULAC denounces violent crime in our nation and expresses its deepest condolences to its victims and their loved ones,” the group’s presidet Roman Palomares said in a statement.
“However, we believe in the Christian principles of justice, not retribution. Using public executions as a hook to a politically motivated message fuels blind hatred. This kind of language is intended to appeal to an extreme base of individuals who believe the lie that all immigrants are here to harm others.”
More on the backlash to the Gomez’s latest stunt:
Aspiring MAGA congresswoman performs mock ‘execution’ of migrant in disturbing video
Valentina Gomez, who lost the race to become Missouri Secretary of State earlier this year, that undocumented persons who committed violent crimes ‘deserve to be ended’
Vivek Ramaswamy blames ‘90s sitcoms for tech companies hiring smarter immigrant workers
Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the leaders of the Trump administration’s incoming Department of Government Efficiency, blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a decline in U.S. dynamism in science and technology, leading tech companies to hire more qualified foreign-born and first-generation workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts.
His comments follow wider tensions within the Trump coalition, which includes both far-right anti-immigration views, and an increasing embrace of the tech industry, whose workforce is highly diverse and made up of many immigrants and first-generation Americans.
The Independent’s Josh Marcus reports:
Vivek Ramaswamy blames 90s sitcoms for tech companies hiring immigrant workers
Trump coalition’s hardline anti-immigrant stance is clashing with concurrent embrace of tech world, often highly diverse
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