In the days since the anti-ICE riots pushed President Donald Trump’s feud with Elon Musk off the front page, there have been growing signs of tension between populist and libertarian elements of the Republican Party. 

The rift has largely been over the so-called one big, beautiful bill, a reconciliation legislative package that narrowly passed the House on a largely party-line vote and is now being considered by the Senate.

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While much of the emphasis has been on extending the Trump tax cuts, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has increasingly focused on the reconciliation bill’s funding for the president’s immigration-enforcement priorities.

Last week, Miller described the bill as funding the “most significant border security and deportation effort in history, including the entire wall — up front, now, with no possibility of Democrat obstruction.” He added that this makes it “the most important legislation for the conservative project in the history of the nation.”

That presumably puts it ahead of the Reagan tax cuts or defense buildup, the first federal abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade, or the welfare reform law of the 1990s.

Miller has also begun casting libertarian-leaning GOP lawmakers who have said the bill permits excessive deficit spending, as lenient on immigration. He argued on Monday that a border-security amendment proposed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in 2013 could have only become law if the bipartisan Gang of Eight amnesty was enacted.

At the time, Miller was a top aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who led the charge against the Obama-era immigration legislation and later became the first senator to endorse Trump for president during the 2016 election cycle. Sessions had a break of his own with Trump over the Russia investigation while serving as the 45th president’s first attorney general.

“Los Angeles is all the proof you need that mass migration unravels societies,” Miller wrote on Monday. “You can have all the other plans and budgets you want. If you don’t fix migration, then nothing else can be fixed — or saved.”

Meanwhile, fiscal hawks in the Senate have aligned themselves with Musk in speaking out against the megabill. Musk’s criticism of the measure, which has only intensified since he stepped down as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency late last month, led to his public break with Trump.

As the public face of DOGE’s government-cutting efforts, Musk became an important voice for relative libertarianism within Trump’s 2024 electoral coalition. But Musk always had his disagreements with the populists, first evident in a pre-inauguration row over foreign workers and certain categories of high-skilled immigration. And the highly personal nature of some of Musk’s attacks on Trump could diminish his standing with the base.

Since the Trump-Musk split occurred, raucous and often violent protests against immigration enforcement in the deep-blue state of California have put the White House on a collision course with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and other liberal Democratic leaders.

The televised images of the anti-ICE demonstrations have returned immigration to the forefront of many Republican voters’ minds, which could help the White House drag its reconciliation bill across the finish line in Congress.

“The BBB will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the United States,” Miller said on June 3. “For that reason alone, it’s the most essential piece of legislation currently under consideration in the entire Western World, in generations.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also maintained that the bill will accelerate economic growth, though many free marketeers are skeptical that Trump is pursuing sufficiently pro-growth policies, especially on trade.

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Different stripes of conservatives have begun debating which is the most pressing concern, if they have to choose: controlling the debt or controlling immigration. The charts showing $2 trillion deficits in relative peacetime and a $37 trillion national debt are alarming. So, to many Trump voters, are the pictures of rioting, car-burning, and foreign flag-waving — a “potent symbol,” according to the New York Times — coming out of Los Angeles, aimed at obstructing federal law enforcement. 

Trump won votes from both types of conservatives last year as he mounted his historic political comeback. Keeping that coalition together long enough to enact his second-term agenda figures to be his next big challenge.