The furore over whether to welcome skilled foreign workers has exposed deep fault lines between the hardcore immigration hawks who have been with Trump from the start and the "tech bros" who spent a fortune getting the Republican re-elected.
Threatening to grow into an irreparable schism, the row has prompted leading lights in Trump's Maga (Make America Great Again) crusade to highlight what they see as the absurdity of a supposedly populist movement where the mega-rich call the shots.
"I think this most recent war of words between traditional Maga and big-tech Maga was an opening salvo in a long-running battle over the future of the Maga movement," political analyst Flavio Hickel told AFP.
Leading the Silicon Valley faction is billionaire Elon Musk, the South African-born SpaceX and Tesla boss, who shelled out at least US$250 million (S$342.7 million) to bankroll the Trump campaign, even as the candidate pushed scare stories about a migrant-led crime wave that never was.
Mr Musk's money was a boon, but the world's richest man found himself a target of Maga after supporting visas for skilled foreigners, apparently unaware that his new allies' anti-immigrant animus extends to his own employment practices.
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