Watching President Donald Trump unveil new artificial intelligence features for the federal government in Washington on Tuesday brought an epiphany about his ongoing misread of the public’s attitudes toward AI. Trump is not just out of touch with growing public resentment and anxiety about the technology. His mindless boosterism of the industry also suggests he has lost his connection with voters who don’t believe the modern economy works for them. Trump rose to power by claiming to understand those voters and by weaponizing a reactionary nostalgia as a political tool — but his philosophical about-face when it comes to AI could contribute to the undoing of his movement.
In Washington on Tuesday, Trump spoke about AI with the soaring optimism of a capitalist futurist. “I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution,” he pledged. He then articulated an economic philosophy that sounded more Ayn Rand than Donald Trump — and counseled against apprehension about colossal investment in AI lest it get in the way of implied capital-p Progress:
We do not accept mediocrity or stagnation, especially in government, because Americans believe in excellence and constant improvement. We have to constantly improve. If we don’t improve, then everyone’s going to catch us because they’re going to improve. We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us. … We never retreat from a frontier. We never shrink from a challenge. We push forward and build a world that is bigger, better, faster and smarter than it has ever been before.
Trump’s speech reflects an almost religious faith in AI as a guarantor of a better life — and he counsels his compatriots to take the leap of faith with him. He posits that anything less than a full embrace of AI could be catastrophic. Taken alongside his beliefs that the AI industry can be trusted to “self-police,” that he doesn’t need to “worry” about out-of-control AI and that the only guardrail needed for the technology is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” it’s clear that Trump either thinks there aren’t any downsides to a massive and unregulated AI sector, or that those downsides are negligible compared to the upsides.
The American public doesn’t share that view. Poll after poll in recent months has found that a large majority of Americans are anxious about the pace of AI development, are concerned about its use in daily life, are uneasy that it could put them or someone in their household out of work, and are worried that it could destroy humanity. In a number of these polls, a plurality or a majority of Republicans are among those who are discontented with the direction of things.
Trump’s economic sensibilities have gone from nostalgist to futurist.
Trump’s rejection of those concerns is striking given that his political rise was predicated in no small part on an unusually articulated attentiveness to how many people — particularly conservative white Americans — felt anxious about and cheated by the modern economy. And his fixes were not about innovation, but typically centered on a promise to turn the clock back for the people who formed his base.
Trump exploded in the Republican primaries in 2016 partly because he rejected the bipartisan consensus on free trade as an unalloyed good for the American public. By calling out trade agreements like NAFTA as a bad deal for workers, he stood out from the competition by rejecting the orthodoxy that had long served Big Business: that globalization and outsourcing were inarguably good for everyone. He promised old-school economic nationalism and tariffs as a solution to job displacement, suppressed wages and general unease about an internationally connected economy. It wasn’t surprising, then, that Trump performed particularly well among voters from regions of the U.S. hit particularly hard by trade shocks.
Trump’s fixation on immigration as bad for American workers isn’t supported by evidence the way that at least some of his trade claims were, but even so, it revived a right-wing trope about the economy and hinged on a type of nostalgia politics. If immigrants weren’t “taking your jobs,” he claimed, then you’d have more opportunities and better wages. He has lied about undocumented immigrants using Medicare and Social Security and falsely claimed the government was financially strained because of them. The solution, he said, was to expel many of the immigrants who were here and to keep other immigrants out. Trump’s reasoning wasn’t grounded in reality, but it played on right-wing discontent over the ways the country was becoming more diverse and channeled racial resentment as a way to express an economic idea.
Trump has also blocked the green economy, taken measures to increase national investment in fossil fuels and buried his head in the sand about the real future of energy — all to indulge in the fantasy that major fossil fuel industries could be revived endlessly and that no coal worker would ever have to retrain for other work.
With backward-looking proposals on the economy, Trump promised to restore an imagined golden age in America. His rhetoric has relied on an alertness to discomfort with the modern globalized economy — and promised to use retrograde, racialized solutions to deal with it. (All while gifting giant corporations and the rich with a favorable tax and regulatory environment.)
But when it comes to AI, despite what economists and the AI industry itself constantly point out, Trump exhibits no concern about job displacement, suppressed wages or various other social or security costs posed by advanced AI. Trump’s evangelism makes him sound oddly like the old-school Republican establishment he used to pan for not understanding popular discontent with globalization. And in the process of promoting the technology, he was bound to alienate some of the voters who had trusted him — even if his prescriptions were always snake oil.
It’s not exactly clear what explains Trump’s inversion of his usual instincts. In past years, Trump did seem to acknowledge that AI could be “scary.” A number of things could be at play: Huge financial support from the tech industry and close relationships with its titans. A belief that AI growth is the only thing keeping the economy going. Personal investments in AI. A belief that the U.S. is now locked in an AI technology race with China. Total social isolation from everyday Americans while he’s holed up in his bubbles in Washington and at Mar-a-Lago.
Whatever the reason, Trump’s economic sensibilities have gone from nostalgist to futurist as AI dominates the national conversation and the perceived future of the economy. Hopefully this will prompt some of the people he duped into thinking he was looking out for them to catch on to the whole scam.
The post Trump doesn’t realize he’s discarding the sensibility that made him powerful appeared first on MS NOW.
