The News You Need, Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship / Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom /The Coming AI Apocalypse / Trump Wanted Regime Change in Iran / Why China’s Elites Still Want to Leave
Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
New York Review of Books
Alan Cottrill’s fifteen-foot bronze and gold-leaf statue of President Donald Trump, at one of Trump’s golf resorts, Miami, May 2026. Photo: Ben Jared/Getty Images
Scott: In a review of Maggie Haberman’s and Jonathan Swan’s new White House exposé, Mark Danner identifies the emasculation of the legislative branch as the key tactical maneuver of the Trump administration in its campaign to disable American democracy and put dictatorship in its place.
Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”
Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?...
Trump’s true innovation as an American authoritarian is not the profligate abuse of emergency powers but the full-on castration of a Congress that allowed him to do it.
Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?
New York Times
Scott: The tech bro making the biggest grab for media control and influence is Oracle’s Larry Ellison. But at this point, much of the market is betting that his extended play for control of Warner Bros/CNN was classic overreach, which has imperiled the position of Oracle. Could the downfall of Ellison’s empire be the pop that bursts the tech bro world?
On Jan. 21, 2025 — the first full day of the second Trump administration — Larry Ellison woke up in his 33-bedroom, 34-bathroom oceanfront mansion in Florida, got into his Gulfstream jet and headed up to Washington. Ellison, who was 80 and worth in the neighborhood of $200 billion, had an appointment at the White House. He didn’t bother to take a driver’s license — he needed to call someone on the president’s staff to vouch for him at the gate — but there he was, at 2 p.m., standing beside Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room as the president announced “the largest A.I. infrastructure project by far in history” and told the world that his friend Larry Ellison was just the man to get it done. “He’s sort of C.E.O. of everything,” Trump said. “He’s an amazing man and an amazing businessperson.”
Ellison began by thanking Trump. “We certainly couldn’t do this without you,” he said. “It would simply be impossible.” He then proceeded to sketch out the ambitious plan. Ellison’s database software and cloud computing company, Oracle, and its partners — most prominently OpenAI — were going to invest as much as $500 billion over the next four years into a group of sprawling data centers, 500,000 square feet each, that would produce 10 gigawatts of computing power, using enough energy to power as many as 10 million homes. It was called Project Stargate, after the 1994 sci-fi movie in which Kurt Russell steps through a wormhole and finds himself inside a pyramid on an alien planet. This Stargate would be a portal leading humanity from the postindustrial era to the artificial-intelligence age.
Ellison had come around to Trump long before many other tech leaders. After the 2020 election, he joined a strategy call of Trump confidants about how to overturn the results, and in 2024, he gave tens of millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign. But OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who was on hand at the White House too, was a Democratic donor and Trump critic. Ellison had helped arrange a call between the two men to tee up the event.
For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom…
But his big bet on A.I. was built on an astronomical amount of debtin every imaginable form — bonds, letters of credit, asset-backed securities — available in seemingly unlimited quantities, because the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. It held that advancements in A.I. were directly tied to the generation of unprecedented amounts of computing power to process unprecedented volumes of data. Reaching the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., when computers match or surpass human thinking at any task, was going to require bigger data centers and a lot more of them. It all came down to capital expenditures — capex, in the lingo of the Valley. Whoever controlled the most computing power would control the A.I. economy.
But lately, some investors and analysts have started questioning the scaling hypothesis or at least asking if all this spending is sustainable. The market has been gyrating wildly in recent weeks, as concerns have grown about whether the trillions of dollars being furiously pumped into this global ecosystem of data centers will ever return the promised profits.
A year and a half after his triumphant trip to the White House, Ellison may be poised to become something else: a cautionary tale. David has slowed his stop-at-nothing effort to push through his deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in the face of a lawsuit from a group of state attorneys general. Ellison is personally worth about $55 billion less than he was on the morning he flew to Washington, and more than $200 billion less than he was at his peak in September. Oracle has pushed the limits of the credit market and is facing steeper interest rates from lenders, and its credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above “junk” status.
The Coming AI Apocalypse
Charles: Donald Trump has done so much more than any other human being to expedite the extinction of the human race, from ending most environmental regulations to spending billions to shut down nascent wind farms, it is a challenge to pinpoint what in particular he has done that has been most effective to achieve this goal.
I strongly believe AI investigator Eliezer Yudkowsky is the most plausible prognosticator about where this magic technology will lead us. Once upon a time, Yudkowsky was a close collaborator of Peter Thiel. That ended when Thiel decided that any advocate of any sensible regulation of AI was not just a luddite, but an actual Antichrist.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
With every new report of AI breaking out of its own shell to attack a rival site, Yukkowsky’s predictions become more believable.
As I’ve noted before, this is what he wrote in Time magazine way back in 2023:
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.
Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.
Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”
The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss. Valid metaphors include “a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15”, “the 11th century trying to fight the 21st century,” and “Australopithecus trying to fight Homo sapiens“.
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on earth dies shortly thereafter.
And what has Trump done to make these predictions ever so much more likely to come true? Because he had been purchased outright by the tech brothers before his second inauguration, the day he took office in 2025 Trump signed an executive order that eliminated every sensible AI restriction Joe Biden had created.
To remain thematic here, I’ll let AI summarize what Biden did and Trump destroyed:
Key Components of Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14110 (2023)
Safety & Security Mandates: Required developers of powerful frontier AI models to share safety test results and critical information with the U.S. government under the Defense Production Act. [1, 2]
Biological and Nuclear Protections: Mandated rigorous testing to ensure AI systems could not be used to assist in creating biological weapons, dangerous materials, or nuclear threats. [1, 2]
Content Authentication: Directed the Department of Commerce to create standards and watermarking tools for identifying AI-generated content and media to combat misinformation. [1, 2]
Civil Rights & Bias: Instructed federal agencies to prevent algorithmic discrimination in housing, education, and employment. [1]
Privacy & Consumer Protection: Called on Congress to pass comprehensive federal data privacy legislation while setting internal agency privacy guidelines. [1]
Labor Market Studies: Directed the Department of Labor to evaluate and address the potential displacement or impact of AI on American workers. [1, 2]
Joe Biden’s AI Diffusion Rule (January 2025)
Global Export Controls: Imposed strict licensing requirements and export rules through the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) on high-performance computing integrated circuits (advanced chips) to specific foreign destinations. [1, 2]
Model Weight Restrictions: Instituted controls on the transfer of model weights for the most advanced closed-weight AI systems to mitigate national security and proliferation risks. [1, 2]
Trump’s Rolling Back Biden’s AI Framework
Revocation of EO 14110: Trump rescinded Biden’s October 2023 order, which had required major AI developers to share safety-test results with the federal government and established the U.S. AI Safety Institute. [1, 2]
Elimination of Mandates: The rollback removed requirements for federal agencies to appoint Chief AI Officers and stripped away specific federal contractor cybersecurity and software attestation requirements tied to Biden’s directives. [1, 2]
Rescission of the AI Diffusion Rule: The Department of Commerce rescinded Biden’s late-term AI Diffusion Rule, which officials argued would have slowed American tech innovation. [1]
New National and State Policies
Barrier-Reduction Focus: Trump issued a replacement executive order titled Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, shifting federal policy toward a minimally burdensome framework to secure U.S. global AI dominance. [1, 2, 3]
Preempting State AI Laws: The administration acted to block individual states from implementing patchwork or restrictive AI regulations that exceed national standards, establishing an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge inconsistent state rules. [1, 2]
National Security Directives: The administration replaced older security directives with updated frameworks meant to speed up the adoption of advanced AI models for national defense and critical infrastructure without single-vendor or ideological bottlenecks.
