He stands accused of being out of touch, enriching himself and his family, building a lavish White House ballroom and, with elections looming, neglecting the hardships of the voters who brought him to power.
Time for Donald Trump to show he still has the common touch? Nope.
On Thursday, the US president went to a building he named after himself, dished out awards to the world’s richest person – his old frenemy Elon Musk – and other tech billionaires and even received an award that belonged to his late uncle.
Given Trump’s gold fetish, the event was naturally entitled the Golden Age of American Innovation summit, which will be news to the many agencies and academies suffering billions of dollars in cuts to scientific research on his watch.
“We have an extremely high-IQ audience for a change,” the president told about 300 invited guests at the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace in Washington, a compliment he never pays to the crowds who line up for hours to attend his campaign rallies.
Standing on a podium with a white backdrop and series of US flags, the president gave a perfunctory speech, sticking unusually close to his teleprompter. He made references to artificial super intelligence but steered clear of the datacentres these tech overlords are erecting all over the country and, in the process, achieving the unique feat of getting Democrats and Republicans to agree on how much they hate them.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House office of science and technology policy, then treated Trump to a video about his uncle, Dr John Trump, an electrical engineer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received the National Medal of Science in 1983.
The short film’s claims that John Trump’s research produced X-ray generators “used for the first radiation treatments for cancer” and that “his radars jammed German defences” on D-day in 1944 owe something to his nephew’s fondness for “truthful hyperbole”.
Six years ago, the president, who believes in “good genes” and “racehorse theory”, suggested that his uncle’s legacy would help him fight the Covid-19 pandemic: “He was a great super genius. Dr John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said: ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
Kratsios had a surprise for the boss. He presented Trump with his uncle’s National Medal of Science in a handsome frame as the audience clapped. He looked happy enough, though it was clear this won’t displace the gaudy Fifa peace prize from his trophy cabinet.
Among the six tech leaders who came up on stage to receive an award for scientific and technological achievement, five were immigrants.
The “America first” president gave the National Medal of Science to SpaceX chief executive Musk (born in South Africa); Google co-founder Sergey Brin (Russia); Jensen Huang (Taiwan), whose AI chip maker Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company; and Lisa Su (Taiwan), head of the semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices.
Trump also handed the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft supremo Satya Nadella (India) and Dell Technologies chief executive Michael Dell (Texas). Hours earlier, JD Vance had announced Microsoft’s suspension from a programme allowing companies to sponsor foreign workers for green cards.
The trillionaire Musk was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and white tie. Trump gave him a pat on the back, handed him the medal and gave him another pat, then showed him a certificate and patted him once more. In earlier remarks, the president called Musk an “industrial titan”, “brilliant engineer”, “national treasure” and “modern day Thomas Edison”. He observed: “It all works out well for Elon, right?”
These guys’ relationship is more complicated than Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. Musk helped buy the 2024 election for Trump and found Doge a useful vehicle to gut the federal agencies investigating his companies. The president considered Musk’s Grok chatbot ingenious after it accurately predicted that ordinary Venezuelans would celebrate the removal of leader Nicolás Maduro, according to Time magazine.
Then came their explosive falling out, with Musk tweeting on his own X platform: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” It turned out both men were in the files.
Vance reportedly brokered a truce between the two titanic egos. The bromance has never been fully rekindled, but Thursday was proof that power and wealth can’t live without each other – especially with elections less than a month away and Trump’s approval rating in the doldrums.
When the ceremony was over, however, it was AI king Huang who remained on stage alongside Trump as the familiar strains of the Village People’s YMCA blasted from loudspeakers (“Young man, when you’re short on your dough,” did not resonate with this crowd). The pair were pointing and directing people, presumably for a photo op, and looking pleased with themselves. It was a fitting closing image of two men who rule the world and may yet find a artificial super intelligent way to destroy it.
