When Donald Trump began his second term as president, Silicon Valley gratefully embraced moral nihilism. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more collectively donated millions to Trump’s inauguration fund to ensure his favor in a new era of gangster tech regulation. Meta overhauled its content policy to allow calling gay people mentally ill and women property. Elon Musk started throwing Nazi salutes — yes, allegedly, but he would soon be posting nonstop about protecting the white race from extinction, so that’s the most fragile of fig leafs.
As of mere months ago, this was working out pretty well for them. The Trump administration took a mostly hands-off regulatory approach, particularly in the burgeoning field of AI. It decided to simply not enforce a divest-or-ban law against TikTok (something that was originally Trump’s own idea!), leading TikTok to thank Trump by name in its app. A Republican-led Congress was too dysfunctional to pass the tech regulations it did want. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission still pursued some existing Big Tech lawsuits, but the flood of high-profile investigations we saw under the Biden administration — and the first Trump administration — slowed markedly. Musk functionally ran the US government for a few months.
And beyond simple regulatory favors, Trump, once a vituperative critic of Big Tech, became joined at the hip with it. Tech CEOs prominently attended his inauguration, and their companies showered him with ballroom donations and gold gewgaws. The White House hosted the reveal of the Stargate Project, OpenAI’s massive data center plan. The US Army created a special detachment for executives from Meta, Palantir, OpenAI, and Thinking Machines Lab, and Trump tapped tech leaders as advisers. He ordered an entire technology renamed because he thought it would make the AI industry look better, and the industry duly fell in line.
Now, these companies’ all-in support is looking awfully risky.
Yesterday’s midterm elections were a historic disaster for Republicans. Democrats not only won the House and Senate, they flipped seats that were considered long shots or downright impossible six months ago: Texas has a Democratic senator and a Democratic governor. Trump is still president, but in Congress, Democrats will be empowered to launch investigations and haul tech execs into hearings, and they’ll have leverage to negotiate over budget and defense bills. And the electoral backlash, of course, bodes ill for Republicans’ prospects of holding the presidency in 2028.
Americans are angry. Trump and his administration’s actions invited much of that anger: his pointless trade wars, a senseless actual war, adviser Stephen Miller’s brutal and lawless immigration crackdowns, and much more. But the tech industry is an easy target, too. Its hyperscale data centers became a flashpoint in numerous midterm races, and public trepidation about AI — a technology whose defenders argue it will destroy countless jobs and possibly kill everyone — is high.
There’s a lot of dirt for newly empowered Democratic lawmakers to investigate. Google may strenuously deny a specious $24.5 million legal settlement was a bribe, for instance, but even as the minority party, Democrats rightly raised questions about it. Trump has enriched himself through connections with the cryptocurrency industry and in the process backed off investigating crypto fraud. Musk may have benefited financially in countless ways from his ties to Trump, and that’s on top of his reckless, destructive, and allegedly illegal actions with DOGE, which devastated parts of the federal government and likely led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
But tech is so overdue for a reckoning that the very term “reckoning” has started to feel like a joke. AI companies have been making vague “please regulate us” overtures for years, and it’s time to take their incessant doom-bragging seriously — by, for instance, using subpoena powers to push them on their responsibility for “rogue” AI agent hacks. Actual legislation likely won’t happen with Trump in office, but if there’s private information that suggests companies should bear legal liability, congressional investigations can help dig it up.
The fight over data centers so far has mostly taken place at a local level, and newly elected Democrats at the state level will likely keep the pushback high. Given how many Republicans hate hyperscale centers too, a Democratic majority could also make a serious bid for federal action — at the very least, they could put a bill on Trump’s desk and force him to own his unpopular pro-data-center stance by vetoing it. And far more easily, they can stymie Trump’s push to override local regulations. Trump’s long-favored state AI law moratorium, which Republicans have tried to sneak through Congress multiple times, seems gone for good.
The fight over data centers will probably only escalate from here
Democrats shouldn’t replicate Republicans’ bad-faith attacks on the tech industry during the Biden administration, which saw Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) weaponize congressional committee powers to accuse social media platforms of censorship. But they shouldn’t be afraid to crack open the alliance between a lawless, grift-friendly administration and a powerful industry that paid him handsomely and was rewarded with regulatory favor. They’re also poised to figure out just how much Trump and his administration — where figures like FCC chair Brendan Carr display contempt for basic constitutional rights, to a point even some Republicans can’t support — have threatened that industry with punishment if it didn’t support him.
Unfortunately, even with an undeniable mandate for change, there’s a huge risk that lawmakers will deliver exactly what they have for the past decade in tech reform: almost nothing. Despite the best efforts of some reformers in Congress, the US has perennially failed to pass even laws with bipartisan support, like antitrust overhauls and a data privacy framework. Hauling tech execs into court creates good sound bites, but without any real action, it only cements the idea that the government is useless.
Democrats probably will soon have tech execs courting them as well. Meta, the fairest-weather friend in Silicon Valley, appeared to be already hedging its bets before the election. They’ll be tempted to retreat into the friendly relationship they had with tech companies during the Obama and early Trump years. But it’s too late to go back. Even at its best, the tech industry needs a check on its power — and the past two years have shown it at its worst.
