How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?

Opinion|How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?

On Sunday evening, the night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, scores of “luminaries from across the New Right” are expected to gather for a dinner and gala called the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel. The event is being hosted by the young right-wing publishing house Passage Press, known for publishing the “neo-reactionary” writer Curtis Yarvin — one of the earliest of those luminaries, most famous for advocating a monarchy “run like a startup.”

Today, this upstart coalition of thinkers may be best described simply as the intellectual wing of Trumpism. “Celebrate the inauguration of Donald J. Trump,” the publishing house announced, “with the people and organizations that will shape the culture in his second term.”

The ball will celebrate more than the re-coronation of a president. It seems intended to mark the ascent of a new counterelite with aspirations to supplant the existing establishment in everything from high politics to business and culture. But this is a loose alliance, colored by rivalries and complex divisions. It has brought together people who previously had little in common. Word had it that Marc Andreessen, the billionaire venture capitalist, would be at the ball. Steve Bannon, avowed enemy of the Silicon Valley billionaire class, was to be a keynote speaker.

Many guests were a bit nervy about outfits and expectations. They would also be navigating these fissures within Mr. Trump’s coalition. Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Bannon stand on either side of the biggest of these divides — and the one presenting the greatest challenge for Mr. Trump’s governing project.

It’s a gap in worldviews that went overlooked in the heady days of the campaign. When Elon Musk endorsed Mr. Trump, putting a great deal of personal money and energy into the project of MAGA populism, he joined figures like the venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks and the crypto exchange founder Tyler Winklevoss in what represents one of the most surprising and disruptive alliances in American political history. Tech emerged as an alternate power center to the Republican establishment. Silicon Valley money filled in for dollars lost from the traditional donor class. As the presidential transition took shape, tech figures stepped in to supply “elite human capital,” as they put it, to staff the new administration. All the biggest tech companies made sure to offer a $1 million tribute to help fund the inauguration.

But the core of the aspiring Trumpian aristocracy are still reactionaries and nationalists aching to restore an American way of life thought to be lost after decades of “globalist” technocracy. They are often deeply skeptical of the idea that the innovations promised by tech companies represent progress, and they describe America as “not just a country, not just an economy, but a people with a common history,” as Jeremy Carl, a deputy assistant secretary of the interior in the first Trump administration and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, told me. The tech figures who came to the movement in 2024 were often sympathetic to Trumpian nationalism. But they tended to be more interested in making money and launching a new era of “American dynamism.”