Ben’s view
The great mystery of the Trump administration is: When did he decide to become the AI president?
Trump barely mentioned AI on the campaign trail. His deepest engagement on the subject seems to have been, believe it or not, a lucid 2024 conversation with the YouTuber Logan Paul. Trump mused about the “dangerous” capacity of deepfakes to start a nuclear war, but concluded that AI is “going to happen — and if it’s going to happen, we have to take the lead over China.”
“We have to be very careful with it,” he said.
That was pretty much it. The real campaign was immigration, prices, culture wars.
And yet, the day after his second inauguration, Trump stood in the Roosevelt Room with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for a $500 billion investment announcement. The single most consequential decision of his presidency may turn out to be putting the full weight of the American state behind the AI hyperscalers and working overtime to block state and federal efforts to restrain them. David Sacks, his AI czar, has emerged as a central, effective Washington figure.
So why AI?
One administration official offered me an answer last week: Trump’s interest in the technology accelerated when he saw the numbers. A big car company might promise a $5 billion or $10 billion investment. The big AI companies can raise and spend orders of magnitude more.
Trump is good at counting zeroes.
And many in the administration believe his bet is paying off, powering virtually all of the economic growth in a country whose economy is otherwise stagnant. So do leaders of both parties. Govs. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania argued jointly at Semafor’s Powering America’s Future event that building data centers and the energy infrastructure to keep them running represents an economic opportunity in their states.
Trump has “positioned the nation to lead the world in AI for the foreseeable future, so that next-generation AI factories can be built here and we can continue to be the most productive workers in the world,” said Alex Conant, a Republican public affairs consultant who works with AI companies. “It will take years to fully come to fruition, but it’s arguably a legacy on par with our greatest presidents.”
Trump allies prepared for “AI Manhattan Projects” during the campaign. But the president hadn’t campaigned on AI, and pro-AI identity — down to his embrace of AI-generated memes — hasn’t come with a pre-crafted political message. The White House, and even many Washington Democrats, have been trying to fill one in for him: that this is the space race of the New Cold War with China.
This is also an inward-looking, populist moment. Semafor’s perpetually prescient David Weigel noted in October the rise of a bipartisan cause in resistance to data centers. Resentment of Big Tech, a rare bipartisan impulse, has returned in force. Right-wing figures like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and progressive politicians have spent the year promoting their own story: that oligarchs from California with unconventional personal lives have released a product that will take Americans’ jobs, stunt their children’s minds, and replace their religion.
“Haven’t we read about all the billionaires powering AI who have safe houses and bunkers to which to flee if and when the world they’re inventing goes under?” Peggy Noonan wrote last week. “Mr. Trump seems alive to none of this, but regular people are, and this has more to do with our economic unease than we credit.”
Trump and Sacks quietly scaled back an executive order seeking to limit states’ power to regulate AI. But as Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen noted last week, “If AI were a political candidate, it would be getting clobbered.”
Indeed, if AI were a political candidate, it might be JD Vance, whose professional and political careers are rooted in Silicon Valley support. His own public image is complicated, and as an independent figure, when it comes to AI, he might have been the one to yoke Trump’s big-business Republicanism to care for working people. But the vice president doesn’t get to have much independence from his boss.
One Republican political operative I spoke to in Washington recently mentioned they’d been shopping around for a 2028 primary candidate to adopt the anti-AI mantle and outflank Vance on it early.
It’s still early days, and the political battle over AI is just being joined. Recent history has shown that, to the frustration of labor unions and consumer advocates, voters tend to side with what they see as technological progress and generally like the consumer tech products they use. Older voters and women tend in recent polling to be more hostile to AI; some younger voters, especially men, tend to be excited about it.
A vast middle sees both sides. It is waiting to be persuaded.
Room for Disagreement
Democrats embraced a “techlash” a decade ago — and saw few political gains from it, my colleague Reed Albergotti observes:
Notable
-
I talked through the Trump administration’s AI policy with the hosts of TBPN.
-
GOP lawmakers, less unified on this subject, ultimately removed a provision to prevent states from regulating AI from the annual defense policy bill.
-
How Trump allayed some fellow Republicans’ concerns about the AI executive order, via The Washington Post.
