Transcript: Trump’s Angry New Tirades on AI Wreck GOP Midterm Strategy

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

On Monday, Donald Trump let out a series of unhinged tirades about the future of AI. He raged at the very idea of regulating AI and brushed off increasingly dire warnings that are coming from AI scientists themselves. What’s striking is how this seems almost designed to sabotage the GOP’s midterm message. Republicans badly want to appear eager to rein in AI. So how do Republicans maintain this posture when the leader of their party is pushing the opposite? How should Democrats capitalize?

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.

James Downie: Good to be back.

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.”

James, considering that a huge majority of Americans are concerned about AI data centers, that doesn’t seem well advised, does it?

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.

Later this week there will be an event with both Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders coming together to call for far stronger regulations on AI. I mean, that’s a pairing you couldn’t have seen even a couple of years ago. So that just shows just how wide the opposition is.

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?

I mean, we’re talking about independents, we’re talking about moderates, we’re talking about, you know, plenty of even some hardcore Republicans and the occasional MAGA type. So it’s a very big coalition, right?

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.

That’s how quickly this issue is moving. And how it’s not just, as we said, it’s not just the left and the right—it’s the mainstream of both parties coming together in opposition.

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.

Trump let out a second tirade that was even more loopy. He said:

“AI taking over the world, destroying humanity, and all other things bad is a HOAX—no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA—UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE.”

And Trump also said this: “The only reason the AI data center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country. Don’t kill the Golden Goose!”

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.

And then there’s the other aspect, as we’ve seen with the trade war with Canada, where, if you frame things as winning and losing, Trump—as soon as he hears that frame, he’s totally trapped in it. And he can’t break it. It doesn’t matter, even if it’s the apocalypse. Hey, we’re the first ones to cause the apocalypse. Isn’t that great?

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.

Downie: Absolutely. And also, I think there’s another longstanding Trump story here too, which is that this is a guy who’s never suffered consequences. So it’s hard for him to conceive that, like, anything bad would happen to him. Now, especially now that he’s 80—hey, I mean, for him, even if, as the AI companies are saying, by the end of the decade we might all die. Well, he’s 80. What does he care?

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.

Sargent: Exactly. A recent NBC poll found that 70 percent are more worried about AI than are excited about it. And yet here Trump is calling this a scam. James, whenever a Democrat whispers anything that can be construed as out of touch with voters, the media goes absolutely nuts.

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?

Downie: Absolutely. And it’s something we’ve seen much more in his second term in particular. And I think, speaking of topics that a lot of media outlets are scared to touch, I think that’s a factor of age. You would not catch him, I think, being this openly supportive of data centers in his first term.

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 here saying things like data centers, which 70 percent of Americans are opposed to—and as you mentioned, when they try to build, even in very deep red areas, people come out and say, we don’t want this here.

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.

Sargent: Yeah, I think you’re getting at an essential thing here, which is that we don’t often acknowledge this, but Trump really is canny in certain ways. He’s aware of voter sentiment. He knows when the Republican Party is straying. Here the Republican Party is screaming at him to stop, and he’s not doing it. That’s what’s really remarkable.

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.

Those people, they don’t exist here. There’s just, as we’ve seen—whether it’s Natalie Harp or Stephen Miller or whomever—they’re going to either encourage his worst instincts or just sort of smile and nod and not say anything.

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.

As we’ve been discussing, the movement against data centers is really a serious outpouring of genuine political energy that we haven’t seen in some time. And clearly it’s caught Republicans, and maybe even Democrats, off guard. And it’s a proxy for AI more broadly, though to what degree is, I think, not exactly clear.

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?

Downie: Yeah, I really think it’s difficult sometimes to explain to people who are sort of on the younger side, or maybe who haven’t followed American politics for as long, that the way that Trump, in this term in particular, is sabotaging his own party’s prospects, like, in a deliberate sense, and hurting the economy in a deliberate sense—as opposed to even someone like George W. Bush, who was a terrible president.

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.

Sargent: So you wrote about the bigger dynamic here, which is that Trump isn’t letting Republicans make the case that voters should stick with them. You noted that he keeps insisting, for instance, that inflation is totally under control, even as the data keeps showing otherwise.

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.

I think there’s something worth teasing out here, which is that Trump will only allow Republicans to make a case for sticking with Republican rule on terms that flatter him. And that’s just sort of, like, the through line here. And it’s like, you know, you’re really stuck with this narcissist now. Tough shit, man. Like, you made this bed.

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.

And yet this president is already in the 35, 36 percent approval rating. That takes real work, to get to that level in this economy. And he seems to be just pushing every button he can to make things as bad as possible for the Republicans.

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.

In other words, he would actually rather Republicans lose the midterms than win them by doing what Republicans should conventionally be doing in the situation, which is distance themselves from the president. He’s just not willing to permit that at all.

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.

Sargent: How do Democrats capitalize here? We have a new piece on this up at NewRepublic.com. You can check it out—it’s by me, it’s on this topic. It seems to me like Democrats are taking a bit of a narrow approach to AI. They’re essentially treating it almost like a NIMBY issue, mainly: electricity prices, water, local governments getting corrupted by oligarchs, and so forth and so on. There’s not really an effort to put Trump at the center of the story.

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?

Downie: I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that’s true both in the short and long term, for different reasons. There’s sort of the immediate term, with Trump—tying an unpopular president to an unpopular industry, tying the Republican Party to an unpopular industry.

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?

And we have seen in their spending over the last couple of years—including against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, for example, in 2024, where they spent millions and millions against him, just to get someone who the AI industry saw as an enemy out of the Senate.

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.

And we have seen over the last 40 years, we’ve seen that too many times, Democrats think that we can also win over that industry if we take and get some of their money. And then it ends up handicapping or neutering regulations. And what we’ve seen in the long run is that people see Democrats as also not being responsive to the people, as being responsive instead to donors. And that hurts the party’s image long term.

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.

Sargent: Such an important point that you raised there. When they run against JD Vance in 2028, they will be much better off if right now they establish themselves as the party of sensible regulations. James Downie, great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Downie: Thanks for having me.

Source link