OUR DAILY THREAD: The Wrath Of Con

Boldly grifting where no crook has grifted before

THE SET-UP: Rarely a day goes by without a reminder that Donald Trump is what you’d get if you could somehow turn Three Card Monte into a human being.

This time it comes in the form of a six billion dollar merger between the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) and TAE Technologies. It’s an odd coupling of TruthSocial’s parent company with a Google-backed energy company that, as The Register reported, “has been chasing commercial fusion for roughly 27 years.”

Despite that long, fruitless pursuit, the newly-formed hybrid “expects to site and commence construction of the first utility-scale fusion power plant in 2026.” It’s an ambitious goal given the fact that TAE has not achieved ignition. The US government-funded National Ignition Facility (NIF) got there in 2022 thanks to a network of scientists and national laboratories, but they are still the only lab that’s replicated the result. As The Register explained, TAE isn’t quite there yet:

TAE claimed in April that its latest machine, dubbed Norm, produced hot, stable FRC plasma with reduced machine complexity and 50 percent lower costs, but production of plasma isn't fusion ignition - just the first step in the process.

If they are still at “the first step in the process,” the question is … what does Trump’s Devin Nunes-run social media company have to offer TAE? One possible contribution is buried in the combined company’s press release, which added that its plan to break ground on “the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant” is “subject to required approvals.”

Here’s where it gets sticky.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is the main agency the newly combined company will have to impress. It just so happens that the NRC was targeted by one of Trump’s Executive Orders back in May. In it, Trump criticized the NRC for failing to…

…license new reactors even as technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever. This failure stems from a fundamental error: Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion. The NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure.

To counter the NRC’s supposed overabundance of caution, Trump directed his administration to reform the NRC’s “structure, personnel, regulations, and basic operations” to “reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy.” Although the EO doesn’t specifically identify fusion among the list of “new nuclear reactor technologies” the NRC has been directed to “facilitate,” TAE’s unproven fusion technology certainly matches the NRC’s new remit:

Facilitate increased deployment of new nuclear reactor technologies, such as Generation III+ and IV reactors, modular reactors, and microreactors, including by lowering regulatory and cost barriers to entry.

It could be that TAE’s ambitious plan to build the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant is far more feasible now that they’ve effectively partnered with the person who directed the NRC to lower the “regulatory and cost barriers to entry” for new technologies.

Who needs lobbyists when the President of the United States of America has a financial interest in seeing your company thrive?

The fact that they’ve yet to spark a fusion reaction could also be irrelevant. It certainly didn’t dissuade investors. TMTG’s stock was up 45% by the end of trading the day the merger was announced. That translated into a $500 million rise in Trump’s net worth. For the TMTG/TAE chimera, just breaking ground in the new year might be enough to pump up the price given the sharp rise in nuclear energy-related stocks over the last year:

A Bloomberg gauge of nuclear stocks has jumped 38% in 2025, touching an all-time high and adding $566 billion in total market value. Shares of California-based small reactor builder Oklo Inc. have surged around 400%, while those of Korean equipment maker Doosan Enerbility Co. are up more than 330%.

Trading Economics’ Nuclear Energy Index shows a gain of “65.95% compared to the same time last year” and, as of December 19, 2025, the VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF touts a year-to-date return of 58.62%. As Trump might say without irony: "Nuclear is hot!” As Bloomberg explained:

Global fund managers see this year’s surge in nuclear stocks continuing, on an improving regulatory outlook and demand drivers that extend beyond the voracious needs of artificial intelligence.

Obviously, Trump’s EO-driven deregulation is contributing to this surge. He’s also exploiting (manipulating?) a market obsessed with finding investments that might be riding AI’s coattails. Now he’s invested in company that could easily jump onto those coattails. The Motley Fool is not convinced the ride will last for the nuclear industry at large:

The only reason an investor would buy nuclear energy stocks today is based on hopes for the future of the industry.

Whatever the relative merits of the fundamentals, markets tend to respond to stimuli and Trump has three more years to use EOs and tariffs to solicit potentially profitable reactions from investors. And, in the case of nuclear energy, it sparked the market before the EOs were signed. Per Reuters back in May:

Shares of nuclear power soared in premarket trading after a Reuters report said U.S. President Donald Trump will sign executive orders aimed to jumpstart the nuclear energy industry as soon as Friday.

Trump is expected to streamline the regulatory process for new reactor approvals and enhance fuel supply chains, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

It’s worth noting that nuclear energy stocks were collectively mired in a decade-long slump before Trump used the stoke of a Sharpie to deregulate an industry in which he is now invested. Then again, the same is true of cryptocurrency. He’s signed multiple EOs that directly impact his stake in World Liberty Financial, among other crypto-related holdings. As CNBC reported in November, Trump rolled into his presidency with “more than $600 million in income from cryptocurrencies, golf properties, licensing and other ventures” and, of course, “Trump’s push into crypto had added substantially to his wealth.”

But wait … there’s more!

In accordance with the ironically-named Ethics in Government Act, he recently disclosed he’s also been on a corporate bond-buying spree from a roster of companies that have directly benefitted from his policy decisions. Per CNBC:

Trump’s new bond investments span several industries, including sectors that have already benefited, or are benefiting, from his administration’s policy changes such as financial deregulation.

Corporate bonds acquired by Trump include offerings from chipmakers such as Broadcom and Qualcomm; tech companies such as Meta Platforms; retailers such as Home Depot and CVS Health; and Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Purchases of the debt of investment banks in late August included bonds of JPMorgan.

Not coincidentally, Broadcom and Meta Platforms are two of the eight stocks currently powering the AI Bubble. Also not coincidentally, his acquisition of Intel bonds came “after the U.S. government, under Trump’s direction, acquired a stake in the company.”

As for the TMTG/TAE merger, his financial stake in the company comes just two months after “the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) granted TAE Technologies $6.1 million for fusion research via the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) awards.” Newsweek noted that this wasn’t the first time TAE “received these federal grants.” In fact, they also got INFUSE money during Trump's first administration.

Now, though, they’ve got the ultimate prize—a side-by-side investment with the President of the United States. But that’s just one example of one company opportunistically moving to hitch a ride on the AI bandwagon. What began as a convenient conversion from crypto critic to crypto evangelist has evolved into something much bigger than ad hoc opportunism by America’s greatest con man.

He’s made artificial intelligence the central organizing principle of his presidency. And that, in turn, is feeding one of the biggest corruption scandals in US political history. Trump has made and continues to make big policy decisions on Tech’s behalf … decisions that also happen to directly impact his panoply of family businesses.

The incestuous mixture of the Trump family with Silicon Valley and their ménage à trois partners in the Gulf Petrostates is a clusterfuck of corruption that easily rivals the profiteering of post-invasion Afghanistan.

Trump’s taken that to a level “the likes of which nobody has ever seen.”

“Seen” is the operative word, too, because Trump’s ability to get away with it seems to turn on his belief that it’s not a crime if you don’t cover it up. Or, more the point, that he can get us to believe it’s not a crime if he doesn’t even try to cover it up.

After all, a cover-up is itself a tacit admission of guilt.

So, Trump conducts his crimes right out there in the open … from crypto conferences to official trips to the Gulf to White House dinner parties for Silicon Valley and the Saudi to pardons and even Trump’s military parade … Trump and his family have turned the Presidency into a subsidiary of their family business. Until recently, much of that corruption centered on their crypto empire. But crypto—with its similar need for processing capacity and the energy to run it—cannot compete with the FOMO-fueled feeding frenzy that’s taken hold of the AI market.

If there is a cover story for this merger of Trump’s Presidency with Big Tech it is the oft-mentioned “race to beat China at AI” and to “win the future” away from those dastardly Chinese Communists. It’s a sales pitch … a cynical reprise of the same old Cold War shtick that made defense contractors very rich and nearly untouchable.

Back then it gave us the Military-Industrial Complex.

Now Tech is replacing the military in that equation.

Quite literally, too.

Palantir and Anduril are disrupting the defense industry in much the same way tech companies have always “disrupted” existing economic relationships so they can insert themselves as gatekeepers, toll-takers and irreplaceable service providers. Despite his penchant for nincompoopery, Secretary Of Maximum Lethality Pete Hegseth is playing a part in this shift, too. In addition to promising to streamline and accelerate contracting in ways that could favor tech-defense companies, he also recently “unleashed” Google Cloud's Gemini for Government on the Pentagon. He is, according to the press release, “delivering on the White House's AI Action Plan announced earlier this year.”:

This past July, President Donald Trump instituted a mandate to achieve an unprecedented level of AI technological superiority. The War Department is delivering on this mandate, ensuring it is not just ink on paper. In response to this directive, AI capabilities have now reached all desktops in the Pentagon and in American military installations around the world.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance’s one-time mentor and benefactor is cashing in on his longtime relationship with JD’s boss. Peter Thiel’s Palantir has been working on Trump’s purge of immigrants and has become a key contractor in the national security state. Meanwhile, Anduril is scaling-up its challenge to the defense establishment with a massive drone factory in Ohio that was understandably welcomed by the former Senator from Ohio. Both Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp and Anduril’s CEO Palmer Luckey embrace the Tech Bro infatuation with civilizational conflict and they gleefully endorse the use of their tech to identify and kill “the bad guys” Palantir’s systems are trained to identify … like they did for the IDF in Gaza.

But the real action is in the widespread hyperscaling of data centers. It’s a mad dash, too, as companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Musk’s xAI race each other to reach the finish line of market dominance. That means they all need more … more data for more training to better refine and adapt their flagship systems. And that requires continual growth in computing capacity. Stop growing and you’ve conceded the race to the other guys.

Investors are obliging with more capital and more credit (a.k.a. debt) to acquire more land, more buildings and more hardware. Once built, those data centers require more energy and more water to cool the sizzling systems. At a very basic level, AI is just the combination of data centers and energy. Trump is now in fusion energy. As for data centers, The Information noted that his sons just pivoted from currently struggling cryptocurrency into the bubbly world of AI:

Anthropic will get up to 2.3 gigawatts of computing power from data centers being developed by Hut 8, a bitcoin mining company with close ties to the Trump family.

Hut 8 is one of several publicly-traded bitcoin miners trying to pivot to building AI data centers. Google will backstop Fluidstack’s lease payments at the data center, similar to previously announced agreements with bitcoin miners Cipher Mining and TeraWulf.

Hut 8 separately in March formed a bitcoin mining venture with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who is listed as chief strategy officer of the company, American Bitcoin. Shares in Hut 8 rose about 10% in Wednesday trading following the announcements.

Not surprisingly, their father already made sure Hut 8 and a host of companies like it will get a helping hand from the federal government thanks to an Executive Order he signed in July. Titled “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” the EO sketched out his administration’s plan “to facilitate the rapid and efficient buildout” of data centers and the “infrastructure that powers them, including high‑voltage transmission lines and other equipment.”

Here are a few of the key gifts Trump distributed to data centers via executive fiat:

…an initiative to provide financial support for Qualifying Projects, which could include loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and offtake agreements.

…the establishment of new categorical exclusions to cover actions related to Qualifying Projects that normally do not have a significant effect on the human environment.

…[expedited] permitting on Federal and non-Federal lands by developing or modifying regulations promulgated under the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act; the Toxic Substances Control Act; and other relevant applicable laws….

…[a review of] the nationwide permits issued under section 404 of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899 to determine whether an activity-specific nationwide permit is needed to facilitate the efficient permitting of activities related to Qualifying Projects.

…offer appropriate authorizations for sites identified by the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Energy, as applicable and appropriate for the relevant uses….

The Secretary of Defense shall … competitively lease available lands for Qualifying Projects to support the Department of Defense’s energy, workforce, and mission needs, subject to security and force protection considerations.

That last directive dovetails with another EO focused on “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security.” Signed in May, it directs the Federal Government to…proclaims:

…utilize its full authority to accelerate the secure and responsible development, demonstration, deployment, and export of United States designed advanced nuclear technologies to bolster readiness and enhance American technological superiority.

The goal is to…

….unleash the domestic nuclear industrial base and position American nuclear companies as the partners of choice for future energy growth throughout the world.

But it all comes together here:

The Secretary of Energy shall initiate the process for designating AI data centers within the 48 contiguous States and the District of Columbia, in whole or in part, that are located at or operated in coordination with Department of Energy facilities, including as support for national security missions, as critical defense facilities, where appropriate.

…and…

The electrical infrastructure, including both nuclear and non-nuclear power generation infrastructure, needed to operate such shall be considered defense critical electric infrastructure, for purposes of this order and subsequently across all applicable statutes, regulations, and directives or other non-regulatory statements of policy, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law.

Like his specious use of emergency declarations, his administration can use the exemptions that come with the slapping the “national security” label on both AI and the nuclear energy he’s keen on coupling with it.

While it is easy to dismiss Trump’s dime-a-dozen EOs as largely performative, the reality is potentially much darker. Thanks in large part to the cut-cut-cut mantra of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficient (DOGE), many agencies have lost veteran staffers with institutional knowledge. His EOs direct and empower the loyalists who’ve replaced them. Add to that the complete absence of Congressional oversight and there is ample opportunity for a new roster of vetted sycophants and industry shills to use “wide discretion” in the application of existing rules … or to essentially “rewrite” them through regulatory indifference.

A regulation without enforcement is just a suggestion no one took.

No where is it more pronounced than in Trump’s dismantling of what’s left of the climate science infrastructure. In fact, he just halted five major windpower projects under the guise (ruse) of protecting national security. Make no mistake, this move has nothing to do with national security, nor is it due to his longstanding grudge against windmills off the coast of his Scottish golf course. His crusade to kill off increasingly efficient renewable energy is all about neutralizing the main challenger to the hegemony of hydrocarbons. And he’s had great success in doing so … just ask the International Energy Agency (IEA) … or the Saudis. But his war on everything “green” has also been a year-long gift to Big Tech. Climate change and environmental concerns presented a significant regulatory roadblock to Silicon Valley’s energy-sucking dream of sentient machines.

Renewables may also threaten the long-term prospects for nuclear energy. Just eight days before he was inexplicably murdered by the man who shot multiple people on the campus of Brown University, the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center was featured in an MIT Energy Initiative news article on the future of fusion energy. Nuno Louriero said:

It’s an “open question” whether it is realistic to expect that fusion power will become commercially viable by the early 2030s. He notes that fusion startups are racing not only against each other, but also with the advances being made in other sources of clean power.

Like the companies racing to reach the Holy Grail of nuclear fusion, Tech’s biggest players are racing to reach their Holy Grail—sentience and singularity. To get there they need more than unlimited energy, they also want a complete exemption from regulatory constraints. Given the gloomy warnings issued by AI experts and scientists over the last few years, it makes sense that AI’s leading purveyors don’t want something like the common good getting in the way of their grand experiment.

And that’s exactly what this all is … it’s an experiment and we are guinea pigs.

Ultimately, most of these Tech Bros want AI to exceed human beings. They expect it. Given enough energy and infrastructure they believe it is inevitable that AI will “wake up.” It could become our partner, our rival or our master. Regulation is the only thing that can impede it. Of course, there’s an EO for that:

Pursuant to Executive Order 14179 of January 23, 2025 (Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence), I revoked my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry and directed my Administration to remove barriers to United States AI leadership. My Administration has already done tremendous work to advance that objective, including by updating existing Federal regulatory frameworks to remove barriers to and encourage adoption of AI applications across sectors. These efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. But we remain in the earliest days of this technological revolution and are in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it.

Supremacy is right up Silicon Valley’s alley. That’s what makes their headlong dive into AI so disquieting. It’s also what makes this EO—issued on December 11—so disturbing:

Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General shall establish an AI Litigation Task Force (Task Force) whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws inconsistent with the policy set forth in section 2 of this order, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment, including, if appropriate, those laws identified pursuant to section 4 of this order. The Task Force shall consult from time to time with the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and the Assistant to the President and Counsel to the President regarding the emergence of specific State AI laws that warrant challenge.

That’s perhaps the most daunting aspect of the marriage of Trump and Tech … it is all happening while the House of Representatives is being run (and run into the ground) by a man who believes the Earth is less than 10k years old. The President relies on superstitious religious zealotry to keep a significant portion of his base intact. And many of them are invested in a strange eschatological melodrama about the end of the world. This is at a time when the entire Executive Branch is being marshalled to serve the dystopian fantasies of Tech Bros who have no compunction about opening Pandora’s Box, uncorking a few Genies or, to put it bluntly, running the risk of unleashing a technology they don’t fully understand nor are they sure they can ultimately control.

Odder still is fact that one of the most influential and connected Tech Bros—Peter Thiel—has been giving lectures on the End Times in which he’s warning Silicon Valley’s elite that the Antichrist is the rejection of technology. And if it all sounds like a SciFi cautionary tale … that’s because it kinda is.

That’s exactly what came to mind when Trump issued an EO near the end of November titled: ”Launching The Genesis Mission.” The EO’s stated purpose is to …

…dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership.

Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory described the EO’s intention thusly:

The ambitious mission will harness the current AI and advanced computing revolution to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade. It will deliver decisive breakthroughs to secure American energy dominance, accelerate scientific discovery, and strengthen national security.

Sounds okay … until you look at the whole picture

We’re tearing up the nation’s renewable energy infrastructure and extending the life of polluting hydrocarbons. We’re risking the livelihoods of millions of workers and potentially risking the future of human beings as a species. We’re also subsidizing the hyperscaling of the very data centers many believe will ultimately make millions of human workers obsolete. And it’s all happening without Congressional oversight and without debate or discussion. We’ve ceded these decisions to a vengeance-obsessed conman who stands to profit whenever he wields the Constitutionally specious power to govern by executive fiat.

He used that power to launch his “Genesis Mission,” which has some eerie parallels with the “Genesis Device” launched by Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. Like the Genesis Mission, the Genesis Device is an advanced technology with incredible potential—both for good and for evil. Like the Genesis Device, the Genesis Mission has fallen into the hands of an incredibly old, revenge-addled man who embraced eugenics and fancied himself the smartest man alive.

But it’s the questions Dr. McCoy asked that make this so trenchant today:

Not only it is plausible that a “successful” Genesis Mission could produce a similar result as the fictional Genesis Device, it is entirely likely that the Genesis Mission will destroy many lives in favor of its new matrix. Really, isn’t Silicon Valley kinda-sorta doing that already? - jp

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