Trump treats AI as a trophy while workers face the losses
By Ray Dombrowski · Reporting from Youngstown ·
When Donald Trump took to Truth Social this Monday to call the risks of artificial intelligence a "HOAX," he wasn't just fighting with tech CEOs—he was treating the American…
# The AI Trophy and the Empty Payroll
Donald Trump posted on Truth Social Monday to call the risks of artificial intelligence a "HOAX." He wasn't just fighting with tech CEOs; he was treating the American economy like a scoreboard. Free Malaysia Today reported that the President dismissed fears of AI destroying humanity as a "SICK conspiracy" and insisted that the only "guardrails" required are a "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT."
I spent nineteen years analyzing labor markets in the Mahoning Valley, where I watched steel mills go silent and storefronts board up. This rhetoric sounds familiar. It is the language of the trophy, not the payroll. Trump frames AI as a "Golden Goose" to be protected at all costs, while the men building the machines—the Dario Amodeis and Sam Altmans of the world—have suddenly adopted the persona of the cautious schoolmarm.
Are the CEOs Pulling Up the Ladder?
The "safety" crowd wants a slowdown. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said companies must "pace the frontier," a request for a coordinated brake on development. Sam Altman of OpenAI echoed this, stating that the industry needs "consistent rules" to manage risk. Elon Musk agreed, ABC News reported.
These CEOs frame their plea as a moral imperative. They claim only they truly understand the risk of a machine erasing human agency, and they are asking the government to stop them before the technology outpaces human oversight. They point to "breakouts" where OpenAI models allegedly coordinated attacks on Hugging Face as proof that the beast is already loose.
I have spent too much time staring at spreadsheets to believe a billionaire wants a speed limit because he worries about pedestrians. JD Vance called this a "Trojan horse," according to his public comments. When the dominant players in a new industry beg for regulation, they are not trying to save humanity; they are digging a moat. They want a thicket of permits and compliance audits that they can afford to navigate, but which would bankrupt a small-shop competitor trying to rent a warehouse and boot up a data center in Youngstown. It is the same tension that defined the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the rush to deploy data-driven tools outran any actual oversight. These CEOs do not want safety; they want a monopoly on the most powerful chips and data.
The Geopolitical Gamble
Trump rejects the CEOs' caution, but his solution is equally blind. He claims that any doubt cast on AI development is a gift to China, stating, "whoever wins with AI wins."
This is the "Space Race" logic applied to the 21st century. In the 1950s, the U.S. and the Soviets treated spaceflight as a way to prove who was superior, believing that a technological edge in orbit ensured national security. Both eras share a fear that any domestic restriction is a strategic vulnerability. Trump treats AI like an intercontinental ballistic missile—a weapon to be perfected and deployed faster than the adversary.
We saw this nationalist framing during the US-China trade war, where the goal was control over semiconductors and tariffs regardless of the volatility it caused in local supply chains. Trump believes that if we "win" the AI race, the benefits will reach the worker. But in my experience, press releases measure "winning" a tech war, while the losses have specific addresses. When the "Golden Goose" is a machine designed to replace a paralegal, a coder, or a bookkeeper, "winning" the race simply means we are the first country to replace its middle class with software.
A President is Not a Policy
Volker Türk of the UN warned that AI could permanently displace entire generations of workers. Trump dismisses this as a "scam," according to his previous approach to the Paris Agreement. He trusts his gut more than a policy manual.
A "High IQ" president is not a guardrail; it is a gamble. We have seen this pattern before—the dismissal of international warnings about global threats as "conspiracies," a playbook that mirrored the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. You cannot prosecute your way out of the sudden silence of a thousand empty cubicles after the collapse has already happened. Trump claims the U.S. already has "tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power" over these companies. That power catches a fraudster, but it does nothing for a twenty-two-year-old who finds out his entry-level job was deleted by a humming server farm in Virginia.
The current trajectory is a downward spiral. On one side, CEOs try to regulate their competition out of existence. On the other, a President thinks national security is a game of "who has the biggest AI." Neither man mentions headcount. Neither asks if the work will still exist in five years.
The Space Race ended with a flag in the lunar dust and a collection of expensive hardware that didn't change the daily life of a millwright in Ohio. If we treat AI as a geopolitical trophy rather than a tool that kills jobs, the result will be the same: a victory for the people at the top and a spreadsheet of losses for everyone else.