Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump

post by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2025-04-18T08:27:27.257Z · LW · GW · 21 comments

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I recall seeing three “rationalist” cases for Trump:

1. Richard Ngo on Twitter and elsewhere focused on the realignment of elite coalitions, observing that “most elite institutions have become leftist monocultures” but speculating that “over the next 5–10 years Silicon Valley will become the core of the Republicans.” The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany. While we have strong free-speech protections now, we could be “frog-boiled by bureaucracies … an unsolved civilizational problem which has already strangled western economies and is now wrecking politics.” Maybe a coalition of new Silicon Valley elites like Musk, Thiel, Luckey, Andreessen, and so on would invigorate DC. He also had a good thread about the Vivek/Vance axis and favored Vivek’s side (Vivek discussed this difference more explicitly with Ezra Klein in October).
2. Richard Hanania in “Hating Modern Conservatism While Voting Republican” said that while he finds many conservatives to be “stupid, intellectually lazy, conspiratorial, bigoted, anti-democracy,” with “awful views on abortion and euthanasia,” and believes they are "largely motivated by ugly instincts,” his priority is economic growth—and that in an election where “one side threatens democracy and the other threatens capitalism” he’ll favor the Republicans and their broad pro-market reflex; he gives prediction markets as an example of an unpolarized issue on which nevertheless the pro- and anti-market sides split on party lines. He concludes that the Republican Party’s “theocratic leanings, bias against foreigners, and cult of personality do not make them worse than the side that is more consistently hostile to economic liberty.” He admits that it’s a compromise: “It sounds funny to say Trump should be jailed for attempting a coup but since he hasn’t been he should be elected president since he’s the more pro-market candidate, but this is pretty much where I am at.”
3. Sam Hammond in “The EA Case for Trump 2024” mentioned a bunch of ways that Trump would be much better than Harris for innovation, growth, and natalism, before turning to the EA element by discussing AI risk. Since the current president might be in office during the development of AGI or superintelligence, he argued that it would be worse to have Democratic interest-group politics dominating the executive branch instead of the more ideologically driven Republican Party that better executed Operation Warp Speed (“Would you entrust the future of humanity to Randi Weingarten?”). In part he alluded here to private information: “And as a participant on the Project2025 AI policy committee, I can confidently report that Trump’s supposed shadow transition takes AGI and its associated risks seriously.”

These arguments were probably different from those of most Trump voters, who were concerned about illegal immigration, economic issues like inflation, and cultural issues like wokeness. I guess those voters are two for three. Meanwhile, Hammond and Hanania emphasize arguments in favor of Republicans in general rather than Trump in particular; Ngo and Hanania specifically mention that Trump will likely be held back from his worst impulses. Ngo and Hammond consider the importance of potential AI development that might take place before January 2029.

The top comment on both Hammond’s and Hanania’s posts is a criticism that points to Trump’s intent to enact a universal 10% tariff. Hanania said on Twitter on October 18 that “Tariffs did increase under Trump last time. They were bad but not high enough to be the end of the world and overwhelm his other pro-market policies. I expect things to be similar in a second administration.” He made a Manifold sweepstakes market on whether the US weighted average tariff would reach at least 6% in any quarter of 2025 (it was 3.5% at its highest level of Trump’s first term). That market was at 35% on election day; the very similar Kalshi market was at 60%.

This month Hanania flipped to saying that “voting for Trump was a mistake” and that he “misread the situation.” He wrote a lengthy essay claiming that populism leads to “kakistocracy” (rule by the least qualified) and added that “in practical terms, I think that people should judge politicians and movements not only according to ideology, but a populist-nonpopulist axis.” He could defend himself at least on the grounds that the markets reacted positively after election day and didn’t see this coming either.

Hammond’s post was widely criticized on Twitter and his Substack and the EA Forum [EA · GW] for having “EA” in the title without considering PEPFAR, farm animals, or other EA concerns. With respect to AI, his claim that AI safety wasn’t polarized linked to an AIPI poll showing that 69% of voters (including 64% of Republicans) supported Biden’s executive order, which Trump repealed immediately upon taking office. Then OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle announced the Stargate project at the White House the next day; though there’s no government financing involved, Trump said he would use his emergency declaration to approve more power stations. Two days later he signed his own order focusing on making sure AI systems are “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” Trump’s FTC is also moving forward with some kind of Microsoft antitrust probe. The focus seems clearly to be on competing with China, which is also a priority for Hammond. Overall he admits that in general “we’ve been mostly sampling from the left tail” but that “my official position is still ‘too soon to tell.’”

Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Richard Ngo preferred to Vance, left DOGE right away and is now running for governor of Ohio. Musk will be leaving DOGE next month and it’s unclear how much influence tech elites have in the administration and the new Republican Party. The view shared by Hanania in 2024 that Trump would be reined in by others seems less solid now: whereas during his first term Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn allegedly twice stole major trade-related documents off of his desk, nothing like that seems to be happening now.

Of course the case for Trump still depends on the relevance of harmful proposals by Harris that Hammond and Hanania mentioned, like caps on drug prices, nation-wide rent controls, and price controls on groceries—she and her surrogates also expressed interest in court-packing. You could also try to read the prediction-market tea leaves for stuff like “Will there be a World War Three before 2050?” declining somewhat after some of Trump’s comments as president-elect. And some people attribute the positive developments within the Democratic Party like the “abundance” discourse to Trump’s victory, since we might not have seen the same enthusiasm had Harris won (see also: Gavin Newsom joking with Charlie Kirk about political correctness on his podcast). But book-publishing timelines mean that the Abundance publication and podcast tour was probably planned well in advance and might have had a similar reception anyway.

So in broad strokes:

• Richard Ngo’s tech-dominated government seems more like wishcasting in hindsight but the idea that Trump would threaten left-wing institutional takeover was basically sound
• Sam Hammond’s arguments weren’t very specific but he did get his China focus with regard to AI
• Richard Hanania was basically wrong, but so were the markets

A general misstep was to underestimate the importance of Trump in particular as a singular individual and attribute too much to the historical tendencies of his party.

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