For Christmas, maybe you unwrapped gifts, baked cookies or hung out with family. Elon Musk spent his holiday week as he usually does: posting again and again on X. But this time it was burning some of the goodwill he’d won with America’s anti-immigrant right.

The backlash escalated Thursday, when Vivek Ramaswamy, in a post on X, criticized an American culture that he said “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”