Good Morning America: AI, Trump and the Future

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That Was The Week

4 min readNov 9, 2024

Oh boy, where to start? You all know I voted for Kamala. I was never a rabid fan. But she was the lesser evil for sure.

I should have seen the writing on the wall when my 21-year-old son voted for the Peace and Freedom candidate, and his friends — many of them young African American men — were swayed by Trump.

I didn’t see the popular vote swing coming, though. It was a virtual landslide with backing from Elon Musk. The outcome was created by the most diverse group of electors the US has ever seen, who gained against the Democrats in over 90% of counties.

I am a person who goes through the seven stages of grief quickly, in about 5 minutes.

I spent the evening on Tuesday glued to CNN, then the All In Podcast, then Bulwark, and then back to CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and the UK’s Sky News. The message was clear within a very short time. I was in bed by 10pm.

X was on my iPhone screen constantly.

Many friends began to express various stages of grief out in the open. By Wednesday morning, there were condemnations of Trump voters as being racist, homophobic, sexist, and worse.

The overall idea was that Trump voters were replicas of Trump.

It is there that we have to take a deep breath. In reality, they are nothing like Trump. There are not 73 million Trumps in America. But they do prefer Trump to Kamala Harris, primarily for good reasons. The Democrats are not good at empathizing with the poor. Their speeches have a sermonizing quality, talking down to the “uneducated”. Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment was not accidental — the view of an elite towards the poor.

Trump cleverly captured their discontent and won favor with them in large numbers across all ages and races without promising them much or anything.

Hats off, honestly; again, I did not see the scale of it coming, even though I suspected Trump may win.

My stocks have gained a lot since Wednesday. Silicon Valley largely voted Democrat but expects to benefit from their loss. Lower taxes and less regulation mean higher and faster gains. Benefits to America’s poor will be harder to find.

Therein lays the real issue. Can Democrats ever be a majority party while focusing on issues that do not reflect the needs of the majority? Or while adopting a superior moral tone and ignoring street-level issues? Trump will not deliver good schools in poor neighborhoods or better pay and jobs. But his rhetoric sounds like he understands. He even managed to sound mildly pro-abortion a lot of the time, neutralizing the women’s rights voters. He sounded pro-innovation by praising SpaceX and Tesla. He sounded better on regulation by criticizing Lina Khan. He didn’t talk down to people or make them feel inferior.

The following 4 years will tell. Early evidence is that there are Democrats prepared to look in the mirror and understand that their job is to reinvent. Some are still in the shock stage, and most are angry, blaming the electors for the sense of Trump and ignoring their role in their downfall. Only reflection and reinvention can have a chance of working. Acceptance and hope beat shock, anger, and denial.

There are many articles this week on the election’s impact on AI. Enjoy if you are able.

Hat Tip to this week’s creators: @profgalloway, @Kantrowitz, @Kyle_L_Wiggers, @steph_palazzolo, @deanwball, @emollick, @asilbwrites, @2020science, @Shriftman, @AndreRetterath, @andresvourakis, @sama, @HarryStebbings, @rhodgkinson, @ajkeen, @Noahpinion

Good Morning America: AI, Trump and the Future

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Published in That Was The Week

Written by Keith Teare

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