How's this for irony? Never in American political history has the business class – or more accurately, one noisy part of it – jumped so enthusiastically on to a presidential bandwagon. But never has a president needed them less.

Trump's core Maga vote is strongly anti-globalisation. This year his campaign acquired the support of wealthy supporters in tech, who are very relaxed about immigration. It's two wildly different cultures, and in the first skirmish it's the Silicon Valley billionaires who got their way.

But it's only the first of many such skirmishes.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican rival for the presidential nomination who made a fortune in biotech, called for more Stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) skilled immigration. We need immigrants, Ramaswamy said, because Americans are lazy and frivolous and watch too much TV.

Not surprisingly, this instantly inflamed the Maga base. Memories are fresh of Silicon Valley chief executives operating a wage-fixing cartel, personally enforced by bosses including Steve Jobs, by agreeing not to hire from each other.

The route by which most Stem-skilled immigrants arrive is the H1-B scheme, which is widely used in Silicon Valley, and by Elon Musk at Tesla, who arrived in the United States on the scheme.

But the scheme isn't, as Musk claims, for the very elite technology skills, "the 0.1pc" that America doesn't have. Just over 386,000 visas were approved in fiscal year 2023. Maga critics of Ramaswamy found they had been demoted overnight by changes to the algorithm on Musk's X social media site, losing their "blue-tick" credential as an apparent punishment.

But Trump appears far more relaxed about Indian tech immigration than he did in his first term, when he attempted to lower the cap. He now says he "always liked the visas". 1-0 to Silicon Valley.

Since the election, Musk has been swaggering around Mar-a-lago as if he's the real vice-president. But historically this is very unusual: business leaders have rarely been involved in Washington DC affairs. During the era of America's most explosive growth, from the start of the Gilded Age in 1870 to the Great Depression, its leading tycoons and industrialists regarded working in Washington DC as about as appealing as mucking in at a parish council meeting on footpaths.