In the Court of King Trump

 

Opinion

Ross Douthat

In the Court of King Trump

 

Jan. 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/opinion/donald-trump-musk-altman.html

Ross Douthat

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

 

A scene from the first week of the second Trump administration: After the president held a White House event announcing a shared venture, with up to $500 billion of funding, among OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to build a vast new data center for the artificial intelligence future, Elon Musk sniped on X that the money for the venture wasn’t really there.

 

Asked if his billionaire ally’s snarking bothered him, the president shrugged it off: “No, it doesn’t. He hates one of the people in the deal.” This was reference to Musk’s conflicts with Sam Altman, the quietly polarizing head of OpenAI. And, President Trump added, “I have certain hatreds of people too.”

 

It was an illuminating moment, not just an amusing line. Every new administration has factions that end up hating one another despite being on the same official team. But the second Trump White House is starting out with a remarkable degree of open conflict among different individuals, constituencies and worldviews.

 

This is not, however, a sign of Trump’s weakness. In his first term many people around him were just trying to drape some semblance of Washingtonian normalcy over presidential incapacity. The second time is different: Trump has set himself up as a king with a court where the main litmus test is personal loyalty, and so there are incentives for any people who wants anything in America (except, yes, more undocumented immigration or more D.E.I. programs) to appear before him as a courtier, risking their dignity in the hopes of winning favors from the throne.

 

For the near term, at least until the Democratic Party gets up off the mat, this means the most important conflicts in American politics are happening within the court of Trump. I’ve already written about one obvious place of potential strife — the broad tension between MAGA populism and Silicon Valley libertarianism. But here are a few more internal wars to watch.

 

Protectionists vs. Wall Street: Notably, Trump’s initial slew of executive actions did not include the big tariffs he has promised to impose on rivals and neighbors alike. His own protectionist desires are clear enough, but his court is full of financial elites whispering warnings about not going too far, not disturbing the stock market, finding a more modest way to play William McKinley.

 

Recent remarks by Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase C.E.O., are a useful example of this whispering. Dimon seemed to be turning Trumpist, justifying tariffs on national security grounds, urging critics to “get over it.” But as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru noted, Dimon was actually justifying a much smaller tariff effort than the broad across-the-board protectionism that Trump has threatened. It’s the courtier’s classic move: Praise the sovereign’s wisdom, while gently steering him your way.

 

Middle East hawks against realists and doves. Trump’s first term delivered a foreign policy that mostly pleased Iran hawks and left little daylight between the United States and Israel. His recent moves, however, are unsettling the hawkish portion of his court: the cease-fire pressure he put on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, a set of realist-leaning appointees, and his petty and unconscionable removal of Secret Service protection for Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Brian Hook, all potential Iranian targets because of their role as hawks in his first term.

 

This last move yielded some direct criticism of Trump himself. But as with the tariff battle, expect more indirect conflict, where different advisers are accused of betraying the president’s true agenda or “weaseling themselves” into positions of influence (as Mark Levin complained of the appointment of Michael DiMino, a non-hawk, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East), with the suggestion that Trump himself would not approve.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vs. the future. Kennedy is a one-man conflict machine — pro-choice in a pro-life party, a critic of agribusiness in a party that depends on Plains state votes. But the deepest tension is between his holistic, anti-corporate vision and the tech accelerationism of Trump’s Silicon Valley allies.

 

For instance, after the same OpenAI announcement that inspired Musk’s snarky undermining, Kennedy’s former running mate, Nicole Shanahan, warned Megyn Kelly that the use of A.I. to design new personalized mRNA vaccines, a scenario touted by Oracle’s Larry Ellison at the announcement, “could lead to an extinction event.”

 

That’s a stark formulation of the potential stakes in a conflict among courtiers. And the odd thing is that there are people on the other side, people working on A.I. right now, who share a version of Shanahan’s crankish-sounding take. They don’t think mRNA tech will kill everyone. But they do suspect, or fear, or hope, that A.I. is ushering in a post-human paradigm, fast.

 

Which means that what would be, in one sense, the best possible economic news for the Trump administration — a leaping-ahead of A.I. progress — could also make his court the site of existential arguments, a culture war to end all culture wars, that leaves every other issue in its shade.