On Friday, as I watched the techbro Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wing of the MAGA movement fight a pitched ideological battle with the more economically populist Steve Bannon wing over the H-1B visa program, I was reminded of how history rhymes.

During the wind-down of the crippled Weimar Republic, the three main power centers in Germany were the armed services, the industrialists and the thugs in the street. Within the Nazi Party itself, power was mainly divided between Adolf Hitler, who wielded the political talent, and one of his only true friends, Ernst Röhm, who led the Brownshirts known as the Sturmabteilung (SA). Röhm had a monopoly on the street muscle.

True power was also somewhat determined by ideological battles, and in this respect the SA tended towards socialism and workers’ interests even though they were fervently anti-communist. The northern wing of the SA was heavily influenced by brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser. Otto, in particular was committed to a left-wing populist (and strongly anti-Semitic) economic program. Gregor was a skilled organizer and propagandist who mentored Josef Goebbels.

Röhm and the Strassers were as instrumental in the rise of the Nazi Party as Hitler, but they were liabilities in convincing President Paul von Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor. For Röhm, the problem was that his brownshirts were violent and lawless. For the Strassers, the concern was their left-wing economic views.

Hitler renounced Otto Strasser causing him to leave the party and set up a rival organization. But reassurance for Hindenburg also came from a November 19, 1932 letter known as the Industrielleneingabe, or Industrial Petition. Signed by business and banking titans like Erwin Merck, Hjalmar Schacht and Kurt Baron von Schröder, it requested that Hindenburg put Hitler in charge. This was ultimately successful, but it didn’t alleviate Hindenburg’s concerns. Throughout 1933 and into 1934, the SA continued to act in a lawless manner and aspired to take control of the armed services, which they outnumbered. Hindenburg eventually threatened Hitler with a military coup if he couldn’t get them under control.

It was at this point that Hitler acted in what is now called the Night of the Long Knives. He arrested and murdered Röhm, Gregor Strasser, and many of their allies, bringing the SA firmly under the control of the military and wiping out the left-wing populist wing of the Nazi Party for good.

In the end, the army and the industrialists won the power struggle over the street thugs, but soon saw themselves helpless to stand up to the political power assumed by Hitler after gaining complete control of the sole remaining legal political party.

That Elon Musk is a latter-day Nazi is easily seen by the fact that on Saturday he published an opinion piece in Welt am Sonntag, a German newspaper, in which he expressed his support for the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party in the upcoming elections.

Musk did not need to reach above Trump to convince a Hindenburg to give him the presidency. But his purchase of Twitter was its own form of a Industrielleneingabe, or Industrial Petition on Trump’s behalf. The world’s richest man was putting his stamp of approval on a highly suspect candidate who had left power in disgrace in 2021.

Now Musk is in the same kind of battle the German industrialists and the leaders of the military were facing against the economic populism of the SA under Hitler. As the world’s richest man, he has to be favored to win, right?

Trump has staffed his incoming administration heavily with billionaires whose interests do not align easily with his MAGA foot soldiers who do not want imported labor of any type, whether skilled or unskilled.

Fascist movements built on alliances between ethnic majority workers and their corporate overlords do not remain stable. One side will win out at the expense of the other. Or it might seem that way, for a little while.

In truth, any movement based on a cult of personality will have no winners. Everyone loses, including eventually the cult leader himself.

But in the short term, Trump will soon reveal where he thinks his interests lie. Is it with the techbros and their desire for skilled foreign labor or with the working class white nationalists who want an end to all nonwhite immigration of any type?

One way or another, a new Night of the Long Knives is not far off.