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Donald Trump loves a deal, even if, at times, it’s just the idea of a deal. The president’s trade dispute with Canada continues to drive one of America’s closest allies into a closer relationship with its chief competition. Although Trump is insisting that “Canada wants to make a deal very badly,” there is very little evidence that’s true, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—enjoying broad national approval for his combative response to the American leader—looks to strengthen its alliances in Europe and Asia.
Meanwhile, AI leaders are publicly calling for a slowdown. That was the gist of the message delivered by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei this weekend in an essay warning that the technological advances of AI are outpacing the ability to ensure that they are safe. His concerns were echoed by some of the biggest names in tech—OpenAI leader Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
But the president saw something else in their warnings: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote on his social-media site this morning.
This week on Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Ashley Parker and Tom Nichols join me to discuss the president’s trade war with Canada, the Trump-centric Republican midterm convention in Dallas, and whether an aging Congress can regulate AI.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Ashley Parker: To be somewhat fair to Trump, or to anyone, is that this is just fundamentally incredibly complex. If you’ve ever watched these members of Congress—which is basically a gerontocracy—try to get to the bottom of Snapchat or Instagram or social media with teens, right, it’s like they’re speaking a foreign language, and those are table stakes, right? AI is a million times more complicated than posting a problematic video on YouTube or Instagram.
Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris. Congress is back on Capitol Hill for the last time before the midterm elections, and they have a lot to think about—the burgeoning trade war with Canada and warnings from tech CEOs about the dangers of unregulated AI, among other things.
And when those lawmakers return to the campaign trail for the final stretch, the ones in competitive districts may have some company—members of the president’s Cabinet.
With me to discuss the news of the week are my colleagues Ashley Parker and Tom Nichols. Let’s get to questions.
Welcome to the show.
Parker: Thanks for having us.
Tom Nichols: Thanks, Adam.
Harris: Ashley, I want to start with you because you had a story that ran recently about something that people I think have become a little bit desensitized to, and that’s the potential violations of the Hatch Act, which limits the partisan political activities of federal employees. You and our colleague Michael Scherer reported on a competition among the Cabinet secretaries to travel to competitive electoral districts. Can you sort of walk us through that reporting?
Parker: Sure. So the first way we heard about this competition, which was not public, was almost inadvertently. We were speaking with a Cabinet secretary who said that there was an event in New York that they had kind of wanted to attend, but had declined because they didn’t want to get docked points in the competition. And we were immediately like, What competition?
And so it turns out that there is this unofficial travel competition in the Trump White House. It’s overseen by a woman named Meghan Bauer, who basically coordinates with all of the Cabinet secretaries, officially running between Memorial Day and Labor Day. And basically the goal is to encourage Cabinet officials, Cabinet secretaries to travel the country, particularly to swing districts or swing states that are competitive in the midterms. And each time they go to one of these areas, they get a point. And what this Cabinet official was worried about was losing points, although the official was mistaken. When we began reporting, many officials at the White House told us, Nobody ever loses points; you only accrue points. And they even said, Look, if someone is heading to New York to, say, do a hit on CNN, to talk about Trump’s policies, that still would count as a point.
Harris: We can talk about it in point systems, but we should also think of it in terms of the law, right? Like, is this a Hatch Act violation?
Parker: So, no, not inherently, but it brings Cabinet officials potentially quite close to the line, and it’s something they need to be careful of. So just to put it in a little historical perspective, this general thing of wanting your top officials, your Cabinet officials, out in the country selling the president’s policies, especially in the run-up to a midterm election, is incredibly common. [George W.] Bush did it; [Barack] Obama did it; [Joe] Biden did it.
And Biden, I remember, the most in-demand Cabinet official at the time, when he was president in the run-up to the midterms, was Pete Buttigieg. So Cabinet officials can go and they can talk about—especially if it’s related to their jobs, an agriculture secretary, for instance, or let’s just take Pete Buttigieg for an example. Pete Buttigieg could travel the country and talk about how this stimulus package that Biden and Democrats helped to pass had brought a bridge to your district, had brought new roads to your state, was responsible for huge construction projects over here that had created jobs. That’s all totally fine and not a Hatch Act violation.
If it becomes more overtly political—showing up in a district at a campaign stop with, say, a Senate candidate and just saying, Hey, vote for Ken Paxton in Texas—that is where you get into problems. And the Trump officials, some of them have gotten into problems.
Harris: Tom, how do you process the sort of flood, the stream of controversy, that comes from the administration?
Nichols: Well, I actually am intimately familiar with the Hatch Act because people filed complaints against me constantly when I was a federal employee, before I came to The Atlantic. I was a professor at the Naval War College, which meant I was a Defense Department employee, but I wrote articles and I wrote op-eds and I spoke my mind. And I always finish with, These are my personal views, speaking as an American citizen, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think Ashley’s description of, boy, right up to the line, is a great way to think of it. And the larger point, I think, is that, Adam, like you asked: Why does this happen? How do we cope with this flood? And I think that the flood is the point. The fire hose is the point, because at some point, you just sort of throw up your hands and say, Which of these, you know, 9 million things?
It used to be that, even in the first Trump term, somebody getting hit with a Hatch Act violation was a big deal. I mean, it made the news. Kellyanne Conway, there were couple of other—
Parker: Yeah, I remember the Kellyanne Conway one. And it stood out, right?
Nichols: Yeah, right. Because it was rare. And because it was so obvious. And I think it’s part of that whole fire-hosing strategy, where you just sit back and say, Okay, fine. I give up, because tomorrow there will be something else. And then the Hatch Act will seem relatively minor by comparison.
Parker: I was thinking about this as I was biking into work today, which is, if you even just look at today’s news, Hatch Act violations are comparatively quaint, right? I mean, I’m biking in, I see that ProPublica has reported that a Russian oligarch who’s very close to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s intimate wedding a few months ago. And amid all these warnings that AI is going to kill us in a doomsday scenario, President Trump came out and said, We’re not slowing down; there’s no regulations. So if a Cabinet official says, Hey, vote for this Republican congressman, in the panoply of things that watchdog groups are worrying about, it’s not top of the list, to be frank.
Nichols: I know the broken-windows theory of crime has been more or less discredited, but there is a kind of feeling of this of, It starts with the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is like turnstile jumping in the subway, but enough people do it enough times and pretty soon, you know, it’s people shooting at each other in the streets and robbing banks. And it kind of feels that way now. There are no guardrails.
I mean, the story that Ashley just mentioned, about Don Jr.’s wedding. Again, if you were a federal employee, if you even talked to a Russian, that was paperwork right there. I could not imagine saying, Oh yeah, and by the way, he paid for my wedding. But we’ve just kind of gotten used to it.
Harris: Republicans gathered in Dallas, Texas, last week for a sort of unusual midterm convention. What did we learn about where Republicans are right now, if anything, coming out of that convention?
Nichols: We learned that the party belongs to Donald Trump and that thousands of people will repeat every word he says if he tells them to. That, I think, tells you everything you need to know—about the party, not about the election, but about the party.
Parker: I think that’s about right, because a lot of Republicans did not think this was a good use of time or money. If you’re actually focused on winning the midterms, they wanted to be campaigning in their districts, in their states—let alone for some of them, depending on the district or the state, aligning themselves with a president who’s quite unpopular and whose policies are quite unpopular. But nonetheless, you still saw a number of them travel to Dallas despite not really wanting to, because as Tom said, Trump is the leader of this party and he demanded a midterm convention, so he got one.
Harris: I was, as I was watching it go on, thinking about what was driving the news as we were heading into the convention, which was this sort of burgeoning trade war with Canada.
Trump himself mentioned Canada briefly during the convention, saying—
Donald Trump: Canada very much wants to make a deal. They’re dying to make a deal.
Harris: Tom, that’s all well and good, but the reality is that the president has chosen to squabble with one of America’s closest allies. Where do things stand now between the U.S. and Canada? And is there any sense of a thawing? Or do you think things are continuing to heat up?
Nichols: Well, first, let’s always point out that the president’s default response to any controversy is that Country X is desperate to make a deal. It’s literally Donald Trump’s Mad Lib—one of the Mad Lib sentences. You know, What do you think about the controversy with Country X? The answer is always, Controversy will be over soon. Country X is begging to make a deal. They’re calling me every day, whether it’s Canada, Iran, the Houthis, you name it.
I think the Canadians have simply decided they’ve had enough of this nonsense. They are no longer partners; they are adversaries in the economic space. But I think that the Canadians have said, Fine.
A majority of the Canadians don’t want to pay for this Trump–Carney tariff war, but they support Carney standing up to Trump. And so my guess is this is not retrievable until Trump is gone from office, which is a real tragedy, even if Trump backs down from the tariffs, which he almost certainly is going to do sooner rather than later, I think.
Harris: Yeah. And as you mentioned, right, Carney’s approval rating is quite high. Ashley, how has he been responding to the president, and how has the back-and-forth been going in recent days?
Parker: Well, I sort of understand Carney in his response going back to a speech he gave much earlier this year at Davos, where he basically said, The world order as we—I’m paraphrasing here—the world order as we know it is over. And all of these sort of smaller countries have always supplicated themselves to the United States for protection or for deals or for various reasons, and that’s no longer a good strategy for us. And so I think Carney’s response in this trade war is him sort of acting on those principles he laid out at Davos. And one thing that was so striking to me when you look at the back-and-forth—and it looks like both sides had issues; it’s hard to point specifically to which side blew up the most recent deal—but one thing that comes through is Trump has talked about wanting Canada to be a 51st state, and that mainly seems to be trolling, except not entirely; there’s always a kernel of truth with everything Trump does.
But in these negotiations, it feels like the American side has sort of internalized the idea that Canada is less a sovereign nation and more a 51st state. And when you look at the terms that Canada objected to, it was stuff the United States negotiators demanded, which would be reasonable if Canada was a state, but is not reasonable if Canada is a sovereign nation and an ally to our north. And it feels like that’s where things fell apart.
Harris: Tom, actually in your piece the other day, you talked about the way that the president doesn’t view other nations as sovereign nations. There’s just this idea that he can’t go in and extract things in the way that he would if it were just a part of something that he already owned. Can you sort of flesh out that idea a little bit?
Nichols: Well, I mean, not to psychoanalyze the president from a distance, but I think most people would agree the president’s a pretty narcissistic guy. He’s got to put his name on everything. He builds monuments to himself. Every sentence begins with I. And people like that don’t think of other people as real people; they think of them as players on the stage that surrounds them. And I think that’s very clear with Donald Trump.
This convention, going back to the convention we were mentioning, you know, he doesn’t really think of other people trying to win elections, and he doesn’t care. They’re supposed to come to his big party and wear a hat and bring noisemakers and that’s it. And that’s the extent of his interest. And I think that’s how he is with foreign countries, that he says they’re all kind of wholly or partially owned subsidiaries of Donald Trump Incorporated. He doesn’t think of them as real places with unique cultures or particular interests led by human beings who may not actually see the world the way he does or care about his interests as much as he cares about his interests.
And that’s partly why you always get these kind of stock answers of They’re gonna make a deal, because of course everybody makes a deal, because that’s what I want. And they’re gonna do what I tell them to do, because of course, all my life, everyone has done what I tell them to do.
It flummoxes him completely when a foreign nation says, We’re not going to do that. And one of the reasons—you know, I don’t want to extend this analogy by Canada too far—but I think that’s one of the reasons he’s having such a hard time with the war of choice he began in Iran. He just can’t imagine that—he says, I demand that you do X, Y, and Z. And the Iranians say, No and here’s a bunch of missiles and drones as part of that answer. And I think he totally unravels him, because he’s just never had to deal with that.
And I think when Mark Carney, you know, as Ashley was saying, Who is this uppity governor, to speak to the president in this way?, instead of the leader of a sovereign nation and place that’s part of NATO and has real interests in the world—one of our second or third biggest trading partners. He cannot internalize that. It doesn’t make it—it’s not like he rejects the idea. It’s like he can’t grasp the idea.
Parker: And just to briefly follow on Tom, I mean, Trump has such legitimate faith and confidence in himself as a dealmaker that he really can’t fathom that. You may recall that when he was campaigning, he said, On day one, the war between Russia and Ukraine will end, which is a sort of promise presidents make—day one signals it’s a priority. But in talking to Trump’s aides, they’re like, No, no; he actually thought that. Like, he actually thought that he was such a good dealmaker, it would end. And obviously it hasn’t.
Harris: When we come back, we talk about the danger of AI, and Ashley and Tom talk about what they’ll be reporting on in the week ahead.
[Music]
Harris: I wanna switch gears a little bit, speaking of the idea of things that people can and cannot control. Over the last several days, CEOs of leading AI companies have been sounding the alarm, really in a lot of the same ways that Bill Gates, when he was on the show with Hanna [Rosin] not that long ago, was talking about the growing risks of artificial intelligence and the products and the ways that people are using those products.
Trump doesn’t appear to be heeding those concerns and has responded that the U.S. has to, quote, “win AI.”
What is your reaction to this, to all of this?
Nichols: That’s a classic Trump answer. You know, We have to win AI. That’s the president’s way of saying, I didn’t understand the question. I don’t really know what this is, and so we just have to win it. Because that’s a good kind of standard. You could have filled in anything: What do you think about the, you know, international chocolate-milk market? Well, we have to win that.
Parker: Yeah, is winning AI, we die first?
Nichols: Yeah. (Laughs.) What does that mean?
Parker: I will confess, I don’t fully understand all of the intricacies of AI either, but from what I do understand, to be somewhat fair to Trump, or to anyone, is that this is just fundamentally incredibly complex. And, you know, lawmakers, one problem you have is if you’ve ever watched these members of Congress—which is basically a gerontocracy—try to get to the bottom of Snapchat or Instagram or social media with teens, right, it’s like they’re speaking a foreign language. And those are table stakes, right? AI is a million times more complicated than posting a problematic video on YouTube or Instagram.
So first of all, a lot of the people in the United States responsible for possibly regulating this are like me, which is terrifying—can’t begin to possibly understand the nuances or the complexities. And the second thing is, even if the United States is willing to regulate, the question is you would sort of need a mutually-assured-destruction pact with China and with other countries. This is a sort of globalized problem.
Nichols: I understand the intricacies very well because I have seen all the Terminator movies. And I know that Skynet is going to become self-aware at some point, and we’re going to regret it.
But to go back to the president’s response, that would have been a more reassuring answer. So that’s a highly complex thing. We want to make sure that we’re handling it responsibly.
And I’m fascinated to know what happened that spooked all of the top, you know, that spooked Altman and Musk and all these other guys. But I’m less of a doomer about it—even if it does scare me. But I think that the first wave of damage, if something like this gets loose, will be economic. But I still don’t know. And, you know, to go back to where we were, I don’t know what it means to win that, other than to say that we will use it to capture more efficiencies than other countries will and put more people out of work faster or something. But I think the danger of this thing is real because the people handling it—I just don’t have a sense that they are looking at this with the kind of civic responsibility that they should have.
Harris: Ashley and Tom, I’m going to ask you to open your notebooks. What questions do you have going into this week? And, Ashley, I’m going to go to you first.
Parker: Sure. So I’m gonna be looking at—I think actually last time I was on your podcast, we were talking about the midterms and why the bottom hasn’t fallen out for the Republicans yet. And, you know, that that was August, but things really kick off after Labor Day. There’s October surprises; voters tune in. I mean, one thing that was fascinating is I talked to someone who does focus groups with swing-state voters who said, You hold up a picture of the Senate candidate in a state, and half the voters don’t even know who he or she is.
So I’m still gonna be asking those similar midterm questions, but at a time when everyone is tuning in and ads land harder; mistakes, gaffs land harder; trying to see where this heads in November.
Harris: And the Republicans are starting to put more of their money into their advertising now. They’re sort of using that war chest we were talking about the last time.
Parker: Yeah, because again, part of this is: They would have liked to have used it earlier. Trump has a lot of money; his groups have a lot of money. But he had to kind of release it. And even if they didn’t spend it, they wanted to get those TV reservations up early because you can get a cheaper rate if you book early.
But the other reason you spend now is because this is when people are paying attention. And Michael Scherer and I spoke to Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio, who said at the time when we spoke, he said, Look, yeah, things are bad for the Republicans, but that’s because we haven’t turned to the Democrats yet. The Democrats have a horrible brand, and you should expect to see a ton of contrast ads because elections, as Biden always says, and as everyone understands, They’re a choice.
Nichols: Ashley mentioned, or Adam, I think you mentioned October surprises. And I’m looking for one because when Trump—it gets panicky. I think one of the things I saw at the convention was that he felt very ebullient and energized, but also there was a lot of fear there. He clearly is deeply worried. And when he gets like that, you’re gonna get a surprise of some kind. He’s gonna. And it’s making me wonder what kind of thing will pop. So I guess I’m worried politically about a black-swan event, where he just does something to change the discussion.
The other thing I’m watching, though, is that both in Russia and Iran, these situations are not going away. They are aware that there’s an election impending. And I have to say I don’t know why this is, but late September, early October is always a very fertile time for an international crisis. And I’m concerned that that crisis could erupt either in the Pacific, in Russia, or in Iran, because they’re not on our timetable. They’re not gonna do things on Donald Trump’s timetable or do things based on his interests. And I think all of those places that we’ve stopped watching temporarily because of so much going on at home are percolating, and I’m concerned about what happens next in each of those three, especially in the Ukraine war and in Iran.
Harris: Well, Ashley, Tom, thank you so much for joining me today and helping me sift through the news of the week.
Parker: Thank you for having us.
Nichols: Thanks, Adam.
Harris: That’s all for today’s show.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson. It has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.
The post ‘The Flood is the Point’ appeared first on The Atlantic.
