Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
James Downie of MS Now has a new piece arguing that Republicans are finding it uniquely difficult to argue for sticking with GOP rule, precisely because the leader of the party is making it impossible. This AI fiasco is a case in point. James, good to have you on.
Sargent: OK, so over the weekend the CEO of Anthropic warned that it’s time for a global slowdown in AI development. Others quickly followed suit. But on Monday, Trump exploded on Truth Social, saying:
Back“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”He claimed that concerns about AI are being pushed by, quote, “conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors, and leakers.”Downie: No. There’s almost nothing that polls as poorly, in particular, as data centers—AI in general. There’s a ton of concerns among voters about what that’s going to do to their jobs, what that’s going to do to education, what that’s going to do to society writ large. And then, especially drilling down on it, the data centers that AI companies are depending on are extremely unpopular almost across the board.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Everybody who’s done serious reporting on the on-the-ground sentiment around this data center rebellion reports that a new kind of coalition is coming into being. It is interesting to see Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agreeing. But it’s not just sort of, like, a horseshoe left-populist, right-populist thing. It’s even broader than that, isn’t it?
Downie: I mean, absolutely. A perfect example of how far we’ve come, and how, as you said, it’s not just sort of the horseshoe ends of the political spectrum: the House Republicans this week are looking to pass a bill to limit data center costs. And this is one year since they tried and failed to put a ten-year moratorium on AI regulation writ large.
Sargent: And the center of the electorate. Very much the center of the electorate, and deep in some red areas as well. It’s quite an event that’s happening.
“AI taking over the world, destroying humanity, and all other things bad is a HOAX—no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA—UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE.”
Downie: Yeah. And so I think here we see two longstanding Trump stories. First of all, there’s the personal interest. His family is invested in AI companies, his sons are invested in that. And as we saw with crypto, for example, Trump went from saying crypto’s a scam to “I love crypto” as soon as he got invested in it—as soon as his family had invested. Like, that’s the first thing.
Sargent: Yes, right, exactly. You know, AI—I think somebody joked, I forget who, but I think it was Brian Beutler, actually, on his Substack, writing something like, AI robots kill a lot of people, but hey, it’s our AI robots killing people. So we win.
And you add that to, again, his wealth has insulated him from consequences his whole life. So for him, his family’s making money, he gets to claim we’re winning, everything’s great.
I really doubt that the mainstream media is going to frame this story that way, as being totally out of touch. They may point out the disparity between Trump’s dismissal of concerns and what the polls say, but they won’t actually say, this is an elitist in a bubble. That’s not permitted to say about Trump. But it really is true, right?
I really think we saw how with an issue like abortion—where he was practiced at soft-pedaling that. When he first ran for president, he had a lot of practice in sort of ducking and dodging and threading the needle and not talking about that, and turning to other topics.
And this is something that, again—not that he’s ever actually had the common touch, but he knew on issues like Social Security and abortion where to sort of break with GOP orthodoxy. And he’s lost that discipline. And now he’s lost that little bit of self-protection from his own mouth. What little he had is completely gone. And now he’s just like, this is great, we’re winning.
Downie: Yeah. And I think one factor is that there’s nobody in this White House who’s going to even bring it up to him. I think, again, not that Trump one was great by any means, but there were people who, let’s say, were willing to give him the bad news. Were willing to say, this is unpopular—not that we disagree with you, sir, you’re great, but this is unpopular.
Sargent: So you alluded before to the Republican Party’s political situation. A number of vulnerable House Republicans have been demanding that GOP leadership hold a vote on a measure reining in data center electricity costs and other things like that.
The essential point, though, here is that Republicans badly want to appear like they’re doing something about data centers, about AI. They want to appear cognizant of the long-term threat. They want to appear like they’re willing to use congressional power to do something about this. But the leader of the Republican Party is basically saying, we don’t have to do anything. Don’t do anything. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like this in some time. Have you?
He did not invade Iraq thinking, this is going to go badly. He thought, foolishly, that we’re going to—to use his vice president’s words—we’re going to be greeted as liberators. It’s going to be tremendous. But Trump, on the other hand, is, like, literally blundering ahead and doing everything he can to make the worst-case scenario for his party come true.
In a sense, Trump doesn’t want Republicans to say something like, look, we know prices are still difficult, they’re still bad for a lot of Americans, we’re really committed to doing something about it—because that would make it look as if Trump failed, and that’s not permitted.
Downie: Yeah. I mean, to those of us who haven’t been in the Trump cult, it’s sort of a “what did you expect” moment. Everything has to flatter the president. And you have a president who—I mean, as rough as the economy is, and as unhappy as Americans are with the economy, and they should be—we’re still, unemployment’s 4.1 percent, inflation’s in the mid-threes. That’s not great, but it’s not completely disastrous.
Sargent: It really does seem like that. I think maybe the way to understand this is as follows. It’s often observed that Trump doesn’t really care if Republicans win or not. I think that’s probably true, but I think we can refine the point a bit and say it this way: Trump doesn’t want Republicans to win the midterms if it’s done on terms that make him look bad.
Downie: Absolutely. I think it’s been essential to his image through his whole life, long before—when he was just sort of dabbling in politics rather than actually taking part in it. His image has always been, I’m a winner. Don’t talk about the bankrupt casinos. Don’t talk about how I had to make my money through, like, stuff like Trump University and Trump Steaks instead of the career I started in. Don’t talk about the banks that won’t work with me anymore. I’m a winner. Everything in his life is about cultivating the image of a winner.
But Trump is at the center of the story. He is allied with the tech oligarchs, and he’s willing to deregulate the future of AI in ways that at least some tech oligarchs are probably going to like, either openly or secretly, as you say. I think Democrats should be making that case a little more directly and saying, this is the party that wants your AI future to rage out of control. Why would you ever put them in charge? What do you think, James?
I think also in the long term, even as Trump eventually will pass from the scene. And I think what everyone can agree on, apparently even these AI executives—I mean, they want to self-regulate, but they agree that there needs to be some. Now, there’s sort of the question of, OK, who does the regulating, what forms does it take?
The Democrats are going to have to face down this industry, if they want to be anything other than no-regulation AI. And this industry has so much money right now. So the earlier you make it politically toxic for the AI industry to be spending money in support of an opponent, the earlier you disarm that weapon.
So I think the earlier you can tie this to Trump, and the earlier you can make the AI industry—these tech oligarchs—politically toxic, or even more politically toxic, it helps you in the long term. Not just against Trump this year, not just in 2028 against someone like Vance, who is very closely tied to these oligarchs, but even in the long run, where you have an incredibly wealthy industry that otherwise can mobilize that money against you for years to come. And you have to disarm that now.
Downie: Thanks for having me.
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