AI vs. MAGA: Populists alarmed by Trump’s embrace of AI, Big Tech

Flanked by Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives in the White House last week, Melania Trump hailed artificial intelligence as potentially “the greatest engine of progress in the history of the United States of America.”

Less than a mile from the first lady, in a hotel ballroom packed with MAGA faithful, top Republican Josh Hawley had a different message.

AI “threatens the common man’s liberty” and could even undermine the Republic itself, the senior US senator from Missouri said.

“The problem with the AI revolution as it’s currently going is that it only entrenches the power of the people who are already the most powerful people in the world,” he said. “The goal is to replace... the farmer, the assembly line man, the construction worker.”

Hawley is a frequent critic of Big Tech. But his comments are endorsed by a growing chorus on America’s right—even as President Donald Trump’s administration scraps regulatory barriers and accelerates AI’s adoption across the land.

It presages an unexpected clash at the heart of the MAGA world.

Evangelical pastors, political strategists, and academics gathered at the recent National Conservatism Conference—the MAGA movement’s ideological nerve center—were full of contempt for the technology.

“There’s a lot of people who are basically worried about... what actually is going to happen to unemployment and families and the culture and education with advanced AI, even if it doesn’t make it to artificial superintelligence,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist who spoke on a panel at the conference.