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Trump's Imitative AI Plan and Authoritarian Politics [1]

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Date: 2025-07-28

Trump has a new imitative AI plan, one designed to give the companies that run imitative AI firms pretty much everything that want. That is not really the problem with the plan. The problem is that it embeds fascism into the way the American government interacts with companies.

This plan sucks, make no mistake about it. It is largely a giveaway to the imitative AI companies. It is largely focused on three areas: regulatory rollback, enforcing Federal rules through the power of the purse, and controlling the output of these systems. All three are terrible in different, and differently frightening, ways.

The first is normal politics. Removing regulations is bad, and it will harm people, but there are always winners and losers in any market. Choosing one regulation regime means choosing some group of people over another, and while that is justifiable, arguing about where those lines are is, well, politics. This sections, while bad, is merely the standard, political arguments. Anti-regulation forces won control of the government and so that get to implement their policies. It is up to people with better ideas to win back control and correct these mistakes. So far, so politics.

The second issue is slightly more concerning. Federal rules override local rules all the time. There is even a justification for this — the economy can run better if the rules are consistent across state borders. Now, this argument doesn’t carry a lot of weight in new industries, as finding the balance between protection and economics is harder to do, harder to judge, with new product categories. It makes more sense to let states regulate as they see fit, with the competition eventually shaking out. reasonable compromise. But, again, ignoring that kind of common sense is just politics. It can be reversed when the other side takes power. And yes, it will do damage to people in the meantime, but that has ever been thus and why people who support common sense regulations needs to win more than they lose. but the method of federal control is disturbing.

Most of the time, federal supremacy in regulation regimes is established by law. Congress passes a law that says, “the ceiling or floor is here, don’t cross it.” That is not what this plan does. Congress explicitly rejected just such a law earlier this year, so the plan tries to work around that. It instructs federal agencies giving out related monies to take into account the best environment for imitative AI — i.e. the environment that does not regulate. They are trying to take money that Congress allocated and place conditions on it that Congress did not intend and, arguably, explicitly rejected. This is a potentially dangerous usurpation of the power of the purse, the kind of thing that a king would do, not a president. And it is not the worst aspect of the plan.

The plan also instructs the government to not sign contracts or otherwise do business with imitative AI systems that the government considers too woke. In other words, the government gets to decide a firm’s speech. Correctly label January 6th an insurrection, correctly talk about the damage climate change does, correctly point out that Trump was president when Epstein was given a sweetheart deal, correctly point out systematic racism affects an issue? Too bad, you are no longer eligible for government contracts. It is unconstitutional, but which imitative AI firms, run as they are by Trump supporters, going to fight this? And it insulates them from their This is not normal politics — it is doing an end run around the constitution to impose government censorship on firms. It is a clear danger to the democratic order.

Politics has real consequences. Choices made through the democratic process can and do affect, even harm, real people. That is why we have something less than pure majority rule, why we have constraints meant to ensure that democracy is preserved. This imitative AI plan is a direct assault on those protections. It is not politics as normal, and pretending it weakens our democracy.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/28/2335465/-Trump-s-Imitative-AI-Plan-and-Authoritarian-Politics?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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