In the court of the Orange King

Ross Douthat, The Wars Within Trump’s Court, NYTimes, Jan. 25, 2025

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 between different individuals, constituencies and worldviews. [...]

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.

Thus:

• Protectionists vs. Wall Street
• Middle East hawks against realists and doves
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vs. the future

Concerning the last:

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 between 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.