How Big Tech Sets the Agenda in Trump’s America

Pay attention and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up for our day by day e-newsletter to get one of the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.Donald Trump is probably the most tech-friendly President in American historical past. He enlisted social media to win workplace; he turned a promoter—and beneficiary—of cryptocurrency, breaking long-standing norms round conflicts of curiosity; and, in his second time period, he introduced Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest tech baron, to the White Home, to disrupt the federal authorities within the method of a Silicon Valley startup. Whereas Musk was ultimately ousted—or “flamed out,” as Katie Drummond places it, for being “loud”—the affect of DOGE continues to reshape our lives in methods we’ve got barely begun to know.Drummond is the worldwide editorial director of Wired, and on this episode she talks with The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent Evan Osnos in regards to the distinctive intersection of expertise and politics, which Wired has tracked assiduously. Tech corporations and A.I., Osnos notes, are driving the agenda within the Trump Administration. “In the event that they’ve realized something from what Elon Musk was in a position to accomplish,” Drummond says, “it’s that that is open season.” Drummond additionally sounds a cautionary word about a number of the doomsday framing of the A.I. revolution. Company leaders “need this expertise to sound as large and daunting and highly effective and spectacular and scary as they presumably can,” she explains. In some instances, “that hyperbole masks the truth that these people have a stake in precisely the eventualities that they’re outlining.”This phase initially aired on The Political Scene on July 26, 2025.New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop each Tuesday and Friday. Comply with the present wherever you get your podcasts.The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.