The story that James noted this morning about the AI Force and whatnot made me think of an anecdote from the book Regime Change that Jonathan Swann recounted on The Bulwark Daily podcast recently.
From the raw transcript (ums and mis-transcribed words and all) is the story (with some emphases by me):
he had never, he really knew nothing about AI, um, and really hadn’t ever interacted with it to any meaningful extent until the 2024 campaign. And what we describe in, in regime change is this scene in Vegas, um, where the open AI executives meet with Trump in this hotel. And he’s with his team and they give him this demo of ChatGBT. And he’s like, he’s really tired. It’s the end of the day. He’s like been campaigning. He’s kind of exhausted. And they put it up on the screen and his eyes kind of like, he’s like, you know, it’s this sort of magic. Yeah. And they start putting in prompts. And from memory, one of them was like, They got the ChatGPT. Remember, this is 2024. ChatGPT was not that great in 2024. They get ChatGPT to turn an executive order on AI into poetry, into a poem.
And Trump sits there and goes, man, this is beautiful. He’s like, he’s reading the poem.
He goes, the poet, these words, they’re so beautiful.
[…]
He was just thunderstruck. It was like he was reading Wordsworth or something. And he turns to one of his A’s, he’s like, you know, this is And he went from being uninterested, tired, whatever, to immediately asking, you know, it was like zero to a hundred. He immediately started asking these executives, what do we need to do? What are the obstacles to you guys growing? How much energy do you need? What regulations can we get rid of? He went from sort of Extremely skeptical, asking them questions…
While I suppose that Trump has nefarious goals when it comes to AI, I am actually more persuaded that he got excited about a chatbot turning an EO into a poem.
There is also the fact that Trump and his allies are heavily invested in AI-related stocks.
Plus, Swann makes a good case that Trump is looking for a way to show industrial growth in rural America, as he has promised, and data centers fit the bill in his mind.
Again, Swann.
if you think back to the first term, his whole promise was, I’m going to bring back Sort of Norman Rockwell America and these old heavy industries. I’m going to bring back the coal mining jobs.
I’m going to, you’re going to see an industrial revolution in America. Obviously that didn’t happen. He obviously pretended it happened, but it didn’t happen. And he knows on some level this is not going to happen. And what we had been hearing from people around him is that when he started to hear these investment figures from people like Zuckerberg and these others, you know, I’m going to invest a trillion dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars. In his mind, this became the new, the way to create a new golden age in America.
Each time he would look at the valuation of Nvidia, it seemed to have gained a new trillion. And Trump himself is a shareholder, by the way, in Nvidia. So he became seduced by these figures. Johnson Huang, who had never really had much of a Washington presence, realized Trump is a personalist leader. You need to engage directly.
He started to call him. He started to drop in at Mar-a-Lago. Zuckerberg is on the phone with him. So they all play the game. And you’re seeing the effects of that now.
The last point about personal relationship also resonates.
I think Trump is going all-in on AI is a combo of liking things like EO poems (and AI slop of him as a muscle-man, or Green Lantern, or whatever), his portfolio, and getting played by tech CEOs.
You know, as a Very Stable Genius does.
