I’ve been reporting on artificial intelligence for a few months now and I still can’t tell you who actually wants this technology other than the people who will profit from it. If it delivers on its promise, it will destroy all our jobs. If it overdelivers, it could drive the human species to extinction. And if it fails to deliver, it will pop a bubble so big it could drive the entire global economy into recession. None of these are good outcomes for regular people.

Yet Trump, who campaigned on bringing back industrial jobs and fighting the elites, is championing this job-killing technology on behalf of tech billionaires. This week, he will issue an executive order restricting state-level regulation of AI. And he is allowing China to buy microprocessors from Nvidia even more advanced than the ones on which he already lifted export controls.

Why is he doing this? As with most things with this president, the answer is even less than meets the eye. He’s doing it because tech titans like his “AI czar” David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang want him to, and they’ve sucked up to him sufficiently to get what they ask for.

Sacks is a libertarian of the blandest variety. Like everyone else in Silicon Valley, he believes in free markets and the mystical powers of entrepreneurs. He wants to block states from regulating AI because he thinks regulations are bad, and while he has no juice with the California lawmakers who are intent on enacting new rules, he has a great deal of influence over the President and the majority caucus in Congress. With the feds in control, he can count on the government to do no regulating whatsoever during this crucial window of AI development, not just because of the Republicans’ reflexive anti-regulatory instincts, but also because he and much of the PayPal Mafia have invested deeply in the MAGA movement and can now expect their ROI.

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He wants China to get all the Nvidia chips it can buy for much the same reason: he thinks governments can only get in the way of the world-changing power of technology companies, including by prioritizing such things as national security over the free market. His argument is that by making China dependent on American technology, we will lock in American structural dominance in the global marketplace, a presumption that flies in the face of the entire rationale for putting technology transfer controls on U.S. military rivals.

Much the same self-servingly sanguine thinking was behind the economic theory of “constructive engagement” with China in the 1990s, which led to the lifting of tariffs and sanctions and the normalizing of Chinese global trade relations. That in turn led to the decimation of American industry, the hollowing out of our manufacturing towns, the immiseration of much of the working class, and a bonanza for multinational corporations and their investors. Those were the conditions that fueled Trump’s rise and that Trump promised to rectify. But instead of fixing them he’s just kickstarting another cycle of American job destruction on behalf of the investor class and to the benefit of China.

Trump, in other words, has become the puppet of Wall Street, the same way that Clinton, Obama, and a dozen other presidents did. But unlike them, he isn’t even trying to obfuscate it. He doesn’t feel the need to, because in spite of his populist bluster, he doesn’t regard MAGA as a movement of American workers against a corrupt elite. He just regards it as his personal fan club. As he has proclaimed once before, he believes “America First” is whatever he wants it to be.

Closer to Trump’s heart than fighting for the working class is scamming them, and AI is the world’s biggest get-rich-quick scheme. The New York Times ran a wild story yesterday about a new data center that just broke ground in a poor border county in New Mexico. The developer pegged the cost of the facility at $165 billion — $15 billion more than it cost to construct the International Space Station. But the developer said a lot of things, including that the data center will create 750 new jobs with salaries of $75,000 and more, even though it’s basically just a digital warehouse. This is the real estate equivalent of what Silicon Valley calls “vaporware.” It wasn’t until the developer had dazzled the county commissioners with the immensity of the project and secured their approval that OpenAI and Oracle came on board as customers, and it wasn’t until after that that Goldman Sachs and a consortium of other banks pieced together $18 billion for construction. Now the data center is going up without an environmental impact assessment and despite significant opposition from locals.

This is the boom that tech titans like Sacks and Huang are intent on riding into transhumanist immortality. You can see why Trump likes it: it’s the sci-fi version of Trump Steaks. It’s a speculative market of shameless hype that promises, if nothing else, to make a small number of rich people mind-bogglingly richer. It’s almost guaranteed to fuck over millions of regular people in the process, from poor rural Americans whose water and electricity bills are set to skyrocket as soon as those new data centers they never asked for go online, to perhaps nearly all of us when we see our jobs replaced by highly intelligent chatbots.

The U.S. government is becoming a kleptocracy rivaling Ukraine’s. Sure, the tech oligarchs had to grovel a bit at Trump’s inauguration and at a few White House dinners, but in exchange they were handed the federal government for pennies on the dollar. Now they’re turning our economy into the biggest ponzi scheme the human race has ever seen. Soon America will be one giant Trump enterprise — shiny, glitzy, gold-looking, full of sexy promises but built on fantasy and destined to collapse as soon as the investors cash out.