Bill Maher slammed President Donald Trump’s “pattern” of political dealmaking during Friday night’s post-show segment.
Maher’s guests weigh in on how AI technology has become increasingly sophisticated at an alarming speed. MS NOW anchor Stephanie Ruhle and Trump’s former national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, criticized the president’s recent moves to allow the sale of AI chips to countries like China.
Ruhle pointed out that the Trump family’s crypto business received a $500 million investment from a member of the United Arab Emirates’ royal family days before his inauguration last year. The president approved the sale of half a million U.S.-based Nvidia’s AI chips to the UAE months later.
“There’s that pattern again,” Maher said.
McMaster argued in the segment that the U.S. must maintain technological dominance in AI, particularly for national security. He said that the U.S. should not cede “military advantage” to the “Chinese Communist Party” by allowing them to get ahead in the AI race.
Ruhle laid out how the Biden Administration prevented the sale of AI chips to China, but under Trump’s second term, that decision was reversed.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for comment.
Ethics experts told The Guardian that the crypto deal was “corruption, plain and simple.” Now, the Trump Administration has cleared the path for the sale of Nvidia’s powerful H200 chips to approved Chinese companies, with a 25% surcharge going to the U.S. government.
“This is what’s important about that,” McMaster said. “These H200 chips can increase compute power in China significantly. And if you look at how quickly these models are learning and improving, the machine learning that occurs in the next few years is really critical.”
Ruhle asked “why on Earth” the Trump Administration would approve the sales, while McMaster called it a “bad decision.”
Maher and the panel had also discussed how Big Tech bosses were eager to “kiss the ring” to consolidate power.
“They were supposed to be these liberal guys in the hippie land,” Maher said. “And they turned out to be, when they smelled the money, it was just completely all thrown out the window.”
However, some tech enthusiasts have not reaped the benefits they expected under Trump. For example, while the president has appeared to line his own pockets through cryptocurrency ventures, crypto bros have raged over huge losses in their own accounts.
During the main show on Friday, Maher decried crypto as a “money laundering” because it was using real money to buy “fake money” that he said was a “pool of untraceable funds.”
President Trump has raked in $1.4 billion since assuming office last year. About $867 million comes from crypto investments.
“When they realized what a super grift and phenomenal hustle it was, they went all in,” Ruhle said of the Trump family.
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