Optimism But Not Confidence as Trump Takes Control

Washington was brimming with optimism this weekend, but not confidence. At the receptions and galas where gossip is the main currency, and on the podcasts where everyone sells their own spin, positivity reigned. “Trump really has a chance to . . . ” people said. “There’s so much upside.”

No doubt this is a “vibe shift”, as commentary suggests, especially when contrasted with the senescent presidency drawing slowly and painfully to a close. The return of a president who can do anything at all will be a major upgrade by default. But the enormous opportunity for reformed governance to deliver a new “golden age”, as the Trump team likes to put it, is not matched by any certainty about how his administration is likely to proceed.

Everyone wants to talk about artificial intelligence, for instance — though less because of excitement about superintelligence than because of the more mundane potential for enhanced productivity. The issue is that continuing to improve the models and expand their capacity for widespread application will require Herculean infrastructure investments on barely plausible timelines.

In one possible world, Donald Trump and his team focus their economic agenda on building: rapidly developing natural resources, expanding infrastructure, subsidising investment and training the workforce. That would make most sense, but it’s not something they have talked about much. Trump himself has been more likely to focus his enthusiasm on cryptocurrency, while high-profile supporters such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have spent most of their energy criticising American culture and calling for more foreign workers.

Likewise, disentangling the American and Chinese economies has become crucially important and Trump has indicated his support on this, including a call to revoke China’s “permanent normal trade relations” status in the Republican party’s platform. Yet despite issuing an executive order in 2020 to ban TikTok, he is now recasting himself as its saviour. A law requiring the parent company, ByteDance, to divest the service to an American firm or else shut it down by January 19 led to the platform going dark that day. Users received a notice that the company looked forward to working with Trump to reinstate it. And Trump is now saying he will do just that. In response, ByteDance brought TikTok back online, to the delight of users.