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

As Trump badly complicates GOP efforts to appear concerned about AI’s future, the author of a piece on his midterm challenges explains how he keeps wrecking the GOP’s message and game plan.

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:

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.........

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