District Club: Trump & AI Leaders Sign Accord, Hegseth Makes Sweeping Changes, and Key Issues Weigh on Midterms

Morning Wire

The episode examines the Trump administration's recent moves on AI regulation, military restructuring under Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the escalating

Key takeaways

• President Trump hosted AI industry leaders at the White House to sign a self-regulation accord, but critics argue it lacks meaningful guardrails for consumer pricing and job displacement.
• Secretary Pete Hegseth announced sweeping reductions in senior military ranks and introduced cultural initiatives like a Religious Liberty Commission, drawing both praise from troops and skepticism from political strategists.

Main topics

• AI regulation and tech industry self-policing
• Pete Hegseth's Pentagon reforms and military culture

Notable quotes

"They wanted guardrails for safety. They wanted guardrails when it came to some of the price gouging we're seeing at places like Walmart..."

Conclusion

The episode underscores how complex policy initiatives and wartime decisions

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Okay, first, before we give you the facts of the day, Run, Hide, Fight! Infidels is streaming now only on Daily Wire. It's an ode to the great action movies of the 80s and 90s. There's even a love story, which nobody expected. And you can support Daily Wire's mission to continue making movies that people actually want to watch. Go check it out. Speaker 4 (0:17) Just a little more than a month to go until the midterms, and the political landscape is only becoming more volatile under added pressure from policy shifts at home and a war abroad. The war in Iran enters its eighth month with no end in sight as Secretary of State Marco Rubio sends Iranian negotiators packing after they rejected U.S. terms for a deal. President Trump hints there may be more bombing after Election Day, but how will growing fatigue over the war weigh on Republican voters at the ballot box? And major changes at the Department of War as Secretary Pete Hegseth announces sweeping reductions in the number of senior officers and plans for the future of warfighting. We'll look at how Hegseth's speech is playing with the public. Plus, the Supreme Court's new term begins Monday. The high court has agreed to review Trump's ICE detention policy as Democrats once again put ICE in the hot seat. In just a few weeks, voters get to weigh in on all that and more. They've got a lot to decide, and we've got a lot to discuss. This is the District Club. Speaker 5 (1:31) Welcome to the District Club. I'm Ben Domenech. Happy to be joined as always by my colleagues, Tim Rice, D.C. Bureau Chief, White House Correspondent. Mary Margaret Olihan and happy to welcome back to the District Club Amisha Cross, a former Obama advisor and Democratic strategist. Great to have you back, Amisha. There's a lot to talk about today. I think that we can get into all of the different things that have happened on the foreign policy front, on the Department of War front. But to me, it seems like the biggest story that was dominating things here in Washington was really built around this attempt by the administration to reestablish a more comfortable attitude toward AI. They brought in all of the different key figures into the White House for this luncheon that got a ton of attention. They signed on to this morally binding agreement, which is to say not so much. Everyone was there except for Apple. And the president issued an executive order rebranding everything for official purposes as superintelligence instead of... artificial intelligence. Given that AI emerged as a major issue in this election that I think nobody really saw coming a year ago as something that would be a major factor, do you think that any of the things that this administration did this week on the AI front will assuage the concerns that voters have had that we've heard in a lot of different fights and in the context of data centers and in the context of all these other things that have really created some problems for Republicans? Speaker 3 (2:57) No, I think that we saw the president try to do a good faith effort. However, there has been nothing that has come out of it. Nobody really knows. The argument from the American public was guardrails. They wanted guardrails for safety. They wanted guardrails when it came to some of the price gouging we're seeing at places like Walmart and other places where, you know, AI is deciding by zip code how much it can charge people. What, you know, extra pricing that they can add to make you buy more things. They are determining the children's ages within your household. There are a lot of things that are going on even outside of the data centers, outside. side of corporations saying that they are not hiring because of AI. And we've seen the slashes and the issues that people have with actually getting employed at this point in time. But none of that has been alleviated by the conversations held at the White House. It seemed like a party for AI. In addition to that, there actually was a party in D.C. for it just last week. So I think that what the people are asking for and what they're getting. aren't necessarily coming together. Speaker 5 (3:49) Mary Margaret, I know you have concerns about data centers. Do you think that anything that the president or the administration did this week, does that make anybody feel a little more comfortable? Like maybe they're at least entertaining the idea of guardrails. Speaker 2 (4:01) Well, I think, you know, the public sees all these CEOs, these leaders in the tech industry, these leaders in the social media companies. I don't think that goes unnoticed and I don't think it has no effect. Obviously, this happened literally this week. So it's a little early to tell what kind of effect that had on the public. But I wouldn't say it's a negative one. I think that, you know, if you're an average American seeing Mark Zuckerberg, seeing the head of Palantir, all of these different companies at the White House with the president, it's intriguing. It's interesting. And it does cause them to have questions and wonder where these kinds of. things are going. I do have to add though On the data center party front, I was just shaking my head all weekend seeing this post from the data center party because it feels so out of touch in the way that a lot of these DCers are looking at this issue. I don't think any person from my hometown out in Virginia is going to see those pictures of, you know, Virginia is for data centers or Virginia is for, you know, whatever these signs were promoting data centers as Virginia's haven. I don't think anyone's going to see that and be particularly persuaded by that. It felt very... online. It felt very D.C. central. And so I think Republicans would do well to shy away from that front. And I actually would point out that it was mostly libertarians at that. I Speaker 3 (5:12) would also say that it is very demographically based. So the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus just a couple of weeks ago had their conventions here in D.C. Palantir was a sponsor of both. CHCI, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, actually eradicated them, basically knocked them off as a sponsor because of the community outrage. The Congressional Black Caucus did not. Speaker 4 (5:30) I think the one thing that might prove useful coming out of the big AI event at the White House is America.gov, which is not to say that it's this like grand, you know, this. Brilliant you're talking about Speaker 5 (5:43) this very efficiency minded website if people haven't heard of it. Yeah, Speaker 4 (5:47) it's a website It's it's basically just like chat GPT tailored for the government so you can pull up any record you can ask questions if you're a veteran about how to get your benefits or things like that and it's It's not that innovative. I mean it's innovative relative to the federal government, but relative to what AI is doing It's pretty much just a super efficient cross government search engine But that is Speaker 2 (6:05) how you can change your name after you get married sure, but that is favorite, but this is Speaker 4 (6:09) I think there is there is We can't discount that people hate new technologies until the second that you can find a kind of quotidian and helpful use for it. Speaker 3 (6:19) So Speaker 4 (6:19) it's Speaker 3 (6:19) efficient for the media. And so Speaker 4 (6:20) it's, but I think that that is, I mean, if this makes it easier to look up information about filing taxes or enrolling in Obamacare, getting a passport, changing a name, it's like how we all sort of became okay with surveillance capitalism if it meant that we could get Amazon to deliver anything to our house in two days. Speaker 5 (6:34) So here's the, I think you're actually right about that, but I don't think it's going to benefit them in this election. The reason I think you're right about that is because I had to go to six different departments and places in order. to get my daughter's social security number that she had never received because she was born during COVID. And it just got lost in the mix. I had to go to so many different places. I had to make a scheduled appointment and everything like that. This is supposed to make everything streamlined. So I do think maybe down the road it can benefit. But to me, the problem with that AI thing or the way that it sort of played out was clearly this is meant to assuage concerns. It's clearly meant to say people are freaking out about this. They don't get it. They're worried about the job things. They're worried about the fact that everything, you know, All the promises of things getting cheaper doesn't seem to be happening. I think the problem is that there was nobody really at the table who represents the people who are going to get the short end of this. Like, that is a classic mistake of, you know, the way these tech guys talk about people who are going to lose their jobs. It sounds like they're looking at an Excel sheet and they're just like, OK, this is a bunch. There's a long list of people who are going to treat like widgets. And they're just, you know, this is just going to go away and they're going to have to figure out something new to do. Who's the person at the table there who's like, I don't know, drinking a Bud Light out of a bottle? Speaker 4 (7:47) Which I think points to or could suggest just how much it's the tech guys that are leading the administration on this. Because that is like, right, as you said. The administration is following. It's a classic mistake. But the other way to put that would be it is. Washington 101 that if you're going to have a, you should be happy about the disruption party, you have to have the one guy who says, I'm pretty happy about the disruption. I'm a factory worker, but I'm okay with automation. I'll learn Speaker 5 (8:11) to Speaker 4 (8:12) code. It's going to be okay. You've got to have the plan. But you can't count on the AI Speaker 3 (8:15) leaders of the industry to regulate themselves. There's another issue there because the people who are the smartest about AI that he invites to the table are the people who are creating the very systems that the American people are extremely frustrated with. Well, the Speaker 5 (8:27) other thing that's going on there, when you talk about them regulating themselves. And in general, I think that they have different degrees of willingness to do that across the industry. So I don't want to paint it all. But they also have different fundamentally attitudes toward AI. We saw this reporting this week from the New York Times about the behind the scenes back and forth between one of the leading founders of Anthropic and the Vatican that led up to that people statement on the matter where they were, he was apparently quite frustrated and even furious that the Vatican was suggesting that Claude could not have a Speaker 2 (9:04) soul. Speaker 5 (9:07) Right, which is Speaker 2 (9:08) so insane because you really think you can lobby the Holy Father to say that a robot has personhood and Speaker 3 (9:15) a Speaker 2 (9:15) soul? Speaker 5 (9:15) This random atheist Canadian thought that he could. Speaker 2 (9:19) And he was unsuccessful because the Holy Father doesn't subscribe to that sort of crazy robotic mentality. But I think that is a great point, Ben. It really points to how... how different these perspectives are on AI, where you think that you can persuade the head of the Catholic Church to subscribe to your view of robotics and humanity. It's fundamentally at odds with one another. So I was very glad the Holy Father put out this encyclical on AI. It was very timely, very important. And I think there's a lot of religious Christians or religious individuals across the world that we're thankful because we're really at a turning point here with AI, where there are people who want AI to be recognized as a person. or as some kind of personhood. And that is just fundamentally at Speaker 5 (10:02) odds. Speaker 2 (10:02) If you say corporations are people too, then Speaker 3 (10:03) we can do it. Speaker 5 (10:06) Only for, no, but just, I think one of the points that you just made there, which is important, is that I don't think that the papal encyclical, whether people read it or not, I don't think that it is, it should be lost on us that non-Catholics are also starting to get. worried about this kind of stuff. Like the idea that these, that you've built a person, that you've built someone who's going to have, are they going to have constitutional rights? What are they going to do to our Republic? You know, how are we going to treat this differently? And so I think that is starting to enter the conversation too, in sort of a creepy way and a 300 word thing that misspells United States is not going to actually make anybody feel more comfortable about it. But, you know, that was obviously not just the only thing that we saw happen in D.C. this week. We saw a lot of other things going on. One of them was you made mention of this, Tim, is this new attitude being brought by Pete Hegseth at the Department of War. Speaker 5 (11:04) Can you contextualize this for me? Because as much as this election is beginning to feel very much like a replay of 2006 for me, is Hegseth in the Rumsfeld chair? Is he like trying to do something here to like get in the president's good graces in advance of a midterm where a lot of people could be saying, we got to do something, somebody's got to fall. Speaker 4 (11:29) Yes, but I would even quibble with... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. I was just gonna say, I understand your question now. No, 100%. It's... And I think it's just... Hegseth doing Hegseth, right? That's sort of, he's off on his own island. But yes, I think this is very much him positioning himself to say, all right, well, we're going to lose in the midterms and the president's going to look to fire somebody. How can I make it be Bobby Kennedy and not me? How can I make it be Brooke Rollins and not me? And how do you do that? It Speaker 5 (11:55) can Speaker 4 (11:55) never be Bobby Kennedy. I mean, everything about this, this was... Speaker 5 (11:59) It's going to... Wait, you just said there. I mean, if you're going to actually rank it, do you think Brooke Rollins is top