White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Soft Power, the Secret Sauce of the British Empire

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When President Trump, on the first day of his second term, closed the U.S. Agency for International Development and began dismantling the Voice of America, he also severely curtailed what had been America’s soft power dominance in the world.

With those actions, we abandoned something of inestimable value: the ability to project Americanism, our ideals. Trump retired an entire diplomatic system that had served the United States well since we more or less inherited it from the British.

Soft power was codified as a concept by the late Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in four books published between 1990 and 2023.

While Nye made soft power his own — he coined the term in 1990 — and wrote, lectured and testified before Congress about it, he never totally convinced conservatives what a valuable weapon it was in the national armory.

The proof of that is in the current administration’s indifference to diplomatic and social muscle, and its lack of a mechanism to talk to the Iranian people in Farsi, their language.

Nye believed an important part of soft power was our educational system, and U.S.-educated foreign students going home and spreading the good news about America.

I believe, although it was never thought of that way, that soft power was one of the things that kept the British Empire together. I saw it in action in Africa as colonial rule waned.

James R. Schlesinger, who served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense, and secretary of energy, was a friend of mine throughout his public career and afterward. The one question he asked me constantly was how the British Empire was able to hold together with so few troops spread across so much of the world.

Schlesinger, a former history professor, wondered how those lessons might be applied to America in the late 20th century.

I told him that it was a combination of the hard power of the Royal Navy and British Army but also, importantly, of the then-unnamed soft power.

Take the massacre in Amritsar, in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab. This occurred on April 13, 1919, when a local British commander in the Punjab feared a meeting in a garden might turn violent and opened fire without warning on thousands of unarmed civilians. Official figures reported 379 dead and 1,200 injured; Indian estimates exceed 1,000 deaths.

This massacre hardened Mahatma Gandhi’s attitude to British rule over the subcontinent. His initial reaction, on hearing of the slaughter, was disbelief that the British would do such a thing. He had bought the soft-power assertion of British values, of decency.

Winston Churchill, then serving as the minister of war, told Parliament early the next year that the shooting was “unalterably monstrous.”

I tried to explain to Schlesinger over many evenings, over many years, what I had seen growing up in British Africa as the essence of British soft power.

To me, it boiled down to a kind of moral posture, a determination to project British justice as inviolate, British exceptionalism as a moral force, and a general admirable state of decency. The term soft power hadn’t yet been created, but it was the essential ingredient in British colonial administration.

When American commanders sought the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, they might well have said they were seeking to establish “soft power.” But it was too late.

The concept of soft power and how it blossomed for America has wilted under the Trump administration. The posture now is that economic and military power are how we project influence and authority.

Ironically, while I think Nye did something of great value in identifying and promoting the concept of soft power, he and I didn’t enjoy a warm relationship. He had been President Jimmy Carter’s point man for nuclear disarmament and had favored an end to nuclear reprocessing as well as other aspects of the U.S. nuclear ecosystem.

In 1977, we debated in London, and the argument got so intense that we spilled into the street, shouting at each other.

A British Immigrant’s Defense of Immigration

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Migration, people moving to new lands, is as old as human history, and as fraught. Today it is a global problem complete with layered hypocrisy, cruelty and, always, hope among those on the move. War and extreme poverty collude in driving people to seek a livable future.

There is no simple solution, no slogan that encompasses a fair and reasonable course of action for the receiving country.

I moved from a British African colony, Southern Rhodesia, to the homeland, Britain, when that was our birthright, and to America a few years later. I did that because it was the place I wanted to be, the happening place, the place of all possibility and challenge.

I didn’t plan to stay, and now it is more than 60 years later. And, yes, I was elated to become a citizen.

In those days, if you were British, immigration was no harder than filling in some forms and swearing that you weren’t a communist and wouldn’t live in “moral turpitude” when you got to America. That reprehensible state wasn’t described.

To me, America was more than a country; it was, and remains, a state of mind.

At its best, America is generous, caring, open and empathetic to the world and its hurts. Yet, how human a country! It is replete with hideous mistakes from the Palmer Raids, to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, to the Vietnam War. The gash of slavery hasn’t healed, and racism has left its mark.

America’s genius is that it realizes itself as a work in progress. 

Our major weakness, it always seemed to me, was the obverse of our strength: wishing our ways on others; wanting them to see the light we see. 

Like so many others, my attitudes are conflicted, hypocritical and without a simple, elegant defense. About 30 years ago, I first raised the issue of immigration’s effect on the nation. My concern then was that Spanish was becoming a second language. If that were to happen, I feared the country would enter into the same debilitating, two-nation status that has divided Canada and Belgium.

Also, I have argued against the way immigration has left its mark on Europe, especially from North African migrants who have set up enclaves where there is no attempt to integrate and where their religion has maintained them in isolation; angry minorities in their urban strongholds. That undermines the value of the journey both to the migrant and the host country.

I have come to believe that Spanish isn’t the threat it appeared at that time, and that our ability to absorb and prosper as a result of immigration is at a real and present danger of being wasted, denying us the talent flow that has made us a beacon to the world.

Never forget that every deportation is a human disaster: a life and a family sent into an unknown purgatory.

Recently, I had a weeklong stay at a Rhode Island hospital and marveled at doctors who were from distant lands, including Iran and Arab countries. In the late reaches of one night, I had a crisis. My room was flooded with nurses and their assistants, all helping and caring. From their accents, I was certain that at least four of my angels weren’t born here. I was glad of them.

Just as I am glad that we lead the world in high tech and, at the apex of its leadership, sit immigrants. They dominate at the top tech behemoths.

Not every immigrant has added to America’s greatness; some have brought with them creeds that are hard to accommodate, some have brought crime. Overall, each wave of immigrants has lifted America and its people to new heights.

From those early settlers to the German filmmakers, to the Scandinavians who planted the Great Plains, to the Irish who have informed our culture, to the Italian builders, to the German filmmakers, who came in the 1920s and 1930s and created the Hollywood we know and treasure, to the Jewish refugees from Europe who gave us everything from great music to the magic of Broadway, to high science and lifesaving medical research.

When I first arrived in New York, I wrote to a friend, “This is an extraordinary place, less of a mixing bowl and more of a stew, where all of the ingredients remain intact and yet work together in a kind of wondrous unity.” I wouldn’t withdraw or amend a word of that more than 60 years later.

People move because they aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. Grabbing those who slipped in and sending them to all they sought to leave behind is, to this grateful immigrant, un-American.

We are a big country, big-hearted, too, and we have room for these big contributors to our future.

The Birth of a New Reactor: Thorium Past and Present

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If you are designing a car from scratch, there are certain essentials to begin with. You need to start with the wheels on the corners, for example.

But when it comes to building a nuclear reactor, things are different. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of ways of doing it. The constant is that you need fissionable fuel and a moderator to collect the heat and manage the neutron flux.

That embarrassment of choice — now reflected in the number of small modular reactors (SMRs) vying for market acceptance — may be why thorium reactors, which began with promise, have been left on the shelf.

The nuclear establishment, goaded by the Nuclear Navy’s Adm. Hyman Rickover, wanted light water technology. That is what the first 100-plus U.S. civilian reactors employed.

At the dawn of the civilian nuclear age, it was a straight contest between two fuels: uranium and thorium. Thorium is fertile but not fissile: It can’t start a chain reaction unless it is triggered by a small amount of the isotope uranium-235.

Once this happens, thorium becomes uranium-232 and fizzes wonderfully with a steady stream of neutrons, producing heat in the moderator, which is where the first steps in making electricity are taken.

That heat is captured to create steam that turns a turbine.

Thorium was used in part in the first power-producing, commercial nuclear reactor: the 60-megawatt Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. With three different fuel assemblies, it ran for 25 years, starting in 1957. It used solid fuel, which was to become the standard for civilian nuclear power.

Meanwhile, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, under its director, physicist Alvin Weinberg, work went ahead on what would become a legendary fast-breeder thorium reactor, using a liquid fuel embedded in molten salt. It went critical in 1965 and operated for five years before it was closed by the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Department of Energy) in a political move.

A fast reactor uses extra neutrons to create new fuel and burn up radioactive waste. The process is akin to perpetual motion — but isn’t, of course.

Now a charismatic nuclear engineer, Yash Patel, founder and CEO of AMReactor, is planning to bring thorium back as a viable future option for space exploration, power generation and, eventually, ship propulsion.

Patel told me that his reactors – he has designs for a microreactor (under 20 MW) and for a SMR (250 MW). The planned reactors are molten salt-moderated, thorium-fueled fast reactors.

He believes they will not only be cheaper, but will also operate better than the SMRs now entering the market.

Patel’s plan for Austin-registered AMReactor is to outsource as much of the fabrication as possible.

A fast reactor is called a breeder reactor because it generates more neutrons than are needed to produce fission, and these transmute waste into additional fuel.

Patel went to school in California and while looking for a career, a break came that changed the trajectory of his life. He got an internship with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There he worked on Curiosity, the plutonium-fueled Mars rover. His nuclear love affair, he told me, was “complete and instant.”

From NASA, he went to Texas A&M and graduated in nuclear engineering. He was well along with his PhD, when a family illness caused him to abandon it.

Patel lists two great blessings in his life. “The first was that I moved to America from India. The second was attending Texas A&M. That was another wonderful break.”

After a stint in biopharma, where he prospered, Patel started designing reactors in all his waking hours along with a friend, D’mitri Scott, now the chief technology officer at AMReactor.

Patel said the numbers didn’t work for their plans until they switched to thorium. It was a eureka moment.

There followed a period which he likened to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak working on the first computer operating system. The two young men were obsessed and inspired by what they believed was extraordinary. “Our girlfriends, now our wives, saw very little of us. We sometimes worked all night,” Patel said.

With thorium, they found all they were looking for: a stable source of reliable power that was safe, couldn’t melt down, and was able to handle most of the fission products.

And it was proliferation-proof because of the presence of intense gamma radiation, which made it hard to process, steal or divert. “Thorium was the winner,” he said.

A new reactor is on the way.

 

Air Conditioning Costs Threaten Summer of Sun Belt Catastrophe

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The summer of our discontent is at hand. When I asked a professional weather forecaster what we might expect this season, he said, “Hades.”

That was as disturbing as everything else in this disturbing year.

America has a summer culture. You could say the whole of the Northern Hemisphere has one, but there is a special reverence, a profound intimacy that Americans have with summer. It is a happy place for healing hurts, meeting old friends, making new ones, and the extraordinary joy of just basking, even romancing.

The British usually make jokes about summer. One goes, “I missed summer. I went to a movie and when I came out, it was over.”

Clearly, they aren’t making jokes like that this summer when temperatures have set records and forced people to do extreme things to cool off. Untold deaths have resulted.

The French have always had their own reverence for summer and, as a nation, down tools in August and head to the beach, often in the South.

They, like the British, are suffering in the current heat wave because there isn’t a lot of air conditioning — almost none in homes and a limited amount in public buildings. Only one in five British homes has air conditioning. In France, there is more in the south, but not in the north around Paris. It was never needed.

I have been in London when it is hot, but not as hot as it has been so far this summer. Sitting in a theater in London in summer was excruciating, made the more so because Britain is humid.

Anyone who lives in America’s coastal regions, especially the South, knows the awful combo of heat and humidity.

Deaths from heat in Europe are widespread and are still being reported.

Air conditioning has shaped America for the last seven decades. It has made living with year-round comfort possible in the South, the Southwest and the West.

If it weren’t for our ability — with enough electricity — to reverse the climate in places like Florida, Texas and Arizona, the migration from the north wouldn’t have happened. Once there was air conditioning, people felt they could live comfortably anywhere in the nation.

Even so, all isn’t well. Indeed, this may be the summer of catastrophe, and deaths from heat and uncontrolled fires. The prognosis isn’t good.

The impending social pushback was pointed up by my colleague Herman K. Trabish, writing in Utility Dive. He was attending the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Las Vegas in early June, and wrote in a brief, “Protesters shouting affordability claims and chanting slogans interrupted a speech by NV Energy President and CEO Brandon Barkhuff.”

Trabish continued, “The confrontation shows the extent to which rising energy costs have stoked public anger, raising pressure on utilities and their regulators.”

The protests were directed at a demand charge approved by the utility commission that wouldn’t take effect until next year, but it opened deep anxiety in southern Nevada about the cost of electricity in weather that is getting hotter and hotter.

Protest leader Leslie Vega said, after the protesters were escorted out of the meeting, “In Las Vegas, one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, you cannot live without electricity.”

Vega’s remarks might well reflect a truth for the whole of the South, Texas and the Southwest. Cheap electricity has been a factor in the migration of tens of millions from the northern states. It was never mentioned; it was just there.

Now the price of electricity is rising inexorably as temperatures appear to rise with equal, threatening vigor.

The natural response from those facing disaster in the heat zones will be to blame the electric utilities and the ubiquitous data centers. There will be calls to nationalize investor-owned utilities like NV Energy, and calls will go out to curb utilities that are already publicly owned, including rural electric cooperatives and those owned by towns and cities.

Additionally, residents in many states with wildfire exposure will, from time to time, have their power cut off entirely for periods to reduce the risk of new fires caused by sparks from line shorting. That will cause new anger.

Most of the world accepts that extreme weather, now common, is associated with global climate change, which is blamed in part on greenhouse gas emissions. That isn’t accepted by the Trump administration, which favors further use of greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. The president has said that global warming is a “hoax.”

Hot people have short tempers. They can be expected to have something to say as they suffer, and death tolls rise.

The New Media: A Pea of News in a Mattress of Words

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Journalism is choking on the low-hanging fruit.

Every day hundreds of newsletters and podcasts flood inboxes. These are almost entirely concerned with political goings-on in Washington.

But this isn’t to say that journalism is alive and well. In fact, this is a symptom of journalism’s straitened times.

Mostly, there is just a pea of news in a mattress of words.

The web has made the delivery of journalism cheap and easy, but it hasn’t helped with the high cost of covering the news, of sending reporters to see what is happening in the courts, the state houses, and overseas; or in science and technology, which so affect modern life.

It also hasn’t enabled news organizations to spend months on an investigation that may or may not pay off.

Instead, every minuscule development in politics is treated as a big, breaking event, and is analyzed exhaustively.

Analysis is substituting for reporting. The actual snippet of reporting is often attributed to a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or one of the news services, say, Reuters.

Analyzing nothing much doesn’t change it to something.

Much of what is rushed out as news wouldn’t get past an old-fashioned editor like Jim Michaels of Forbes, who I am told, in that magazine’s print heyday would chide reporters, saying, “You’re telling me things I already know.”

The ease of distribution and recording has also caused blogs with attendant webinars to sprout across the news ecosystem. Much of it is in the form of analysis, more and more analysis of less and less.

The big new entry in my inbox is magazines which were once monthly or weekly, but have joined the frenzy with daily newsletters. These include The Economist, The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Atlantic and even Vanity Fair.

I subscribed because they were weekly or monthly. I didn’t want a daily gusher.

There is also a plethora of digital-only publications — the best in my inbox is ProPublica, which manages original reporting.

The big ones which are, almost, substitute newspapers but are heavy on political coverage include Politico (which is broader) and Semafor. A new entry, NOTUS, is staffed by former Washington Post reporters. So far, it is heavily political.

I remember when people bought the Post for the Style section and its other goodies, not just its hometown industry of politics.

A further indication of the news drought, despite the torrents of words, is how many of the new dailies are quoting what was said on television. Time was when no print outlet would deign to do that. It was expected for television to pick up from the newspapers, not the other way round.

There was a reason behind the old pecking order: Broadcasting needs to have people say things in front of a camera or a microphone. By contrast, print’s best stories come from sources who are keen not to be identified, let alone go on television or radio.

In today’s vengeful times, unidentified sources are essential, to be used sparingly, but nonetheless essential. The reader has to depend on the high standing of the platform and the integrity of the byline to judge the truthfulness.

There is no doubt that the tumultuous politics that began when Donald Trump entered the arena have been good for cable news stations, which have morphed into political channels, shamelessly partisan. The politics have also been good for newsletters and blogs.

But will that be true after the Trump era? The strictly conservative New York Sun reports traffic to MAGA websites is down dramatically.

To escape the virtual political overload, I reach for the three heavyweights among newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and, though diminished, The Washington Post.

What the bulk of the press, from weeklies to big city papers to the new digital entrants, need is a sound source of income so that they have the money to do the job, to weed out local scandal, corruption and abuse, and to develop entertaining writers.

You get what you pay for and in the news business, since it lost its advertising revenue to the likes of Google, you are getting political froth: opinions about the news — most days the same opinion with shadings of difference from many publishers.

Yesterday, I counted 19 of these offerings in my inbox. I gave up on the breathlessness and read a book.

The Fun Is Running Out for Trump’s Presidency

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There is a powerful force that affects politics as much as it affects individual lives. It is fatigue.

We just get darn tired of something, be it a job, a relationship, a hobby or a routine. We have been devoted to it for years, and suddenly we want out; we want to do something else. What we loved doing has become boring and tedious. More work than fun.

A kind of national fatigue played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union: People were tired of the system and its oppressiveness. Likewise, South Africa.

I was in and out of that country just before apartheid came to its timely death. Ordinary White people, including Afrikaners, said they had had enough; they were tired of the whole complex, cruel structure.

It is my contention that President Trump wants out — that for him, the fun is over. The old stimuli — his daily television domination, the adulation, the global recognition — once so important to him, are ebbing.

Michael Wolff, Trump’s biographer, and James Carville, the picaresque Democratic activist, have both speculated, along with several commentators, that Trump may not finish out his term. They imply that some external force, like illness, will cause him to leave office.

But I think he would like to do it by choice because he isn’t enjoying it anymore. The music has stopped.

Trump said during his first term that he had left a good life — by implication, a better life — before he became president. The first year of his second term was more to his liking than his whole first term. He roared back into office in 2025 with advantages he didn’t have in 2017.

Now he was the man, admired by some, feared by many. His whims or idiosyncrasies became policy. He took over America as though he had bought an apartment building and was knocking down walls and digging a swimming pool.

Trump had a palpable majority, and his base, which had developed a kind of religious commitment behind the slogan “Make America Great Again,” was solid.

In Congress, he had a majority, thin but blindly loyal.

The transformation was complete. The Republican Party had morphed into the Trump Party, faithful and unquestioning. He was careful to staff this second administration with men and women who accepted his liege. Additionally, he came in with a kind of manifesto in the form of the sweeping Project 2025, crafted by the sycophantic Heritage Foundation.

Trump bulldozed his way through his first 100 days, signing nearly 40 executive orders on his first day back in the White House. He made Elon Musk the foreman of an unconstitutional entity: the Department of Government Efficiency. It battered the bureaucracy but also established, from the start, Trump’s unbridled power.

“You’re fired!” moved from the fateful catchphrase on the TV series “The Apprentice,” which had made Trump a national celebrity, to a tool of government and a way of cowering the workforce.

In Congress, the withdrawal of Trump’s favor was feared as a career death sentence. Privately, Republican eyes rolled, but publicly, it was Trump all the way.

This year, the edifice of certainty is beginning to wobble.

Being president isn’t all plaudits, and some Trump voters are looking away, worried about the ravages of his private army in the form of ICE and the loss of America’s global stature. They are also concerned that the rich aren’t just getting richer; they are now an aristocracy, rich beyond measure, akin to the feudal lords.

Then came the Iran war, where miscalculation, aided by hubris and ignorance, has led to the real possibility that we will settle for less than we had before the first U.S. shot was fired.

In short, Trump took up arms against a sea of troubles and made them worse. Governing has proved to be more complicated than he dreamed.

It has long been a tenet of the right wing that there are simple solutions for complex problems. It is also the Trump creed.

I would wager the main thing keeping Trump from declaring victory and adjourning to a life of golf and self-congratulation would be that he desperately wants to finish his two acts of self-adulatory construction: the White House ballroom and the triumphal arch.

Trump has shown every indication that he sees his legacy not in Middle East peace or global security, but in the currency that made him: concrete and rebar.

Trump shows many signs of fatigue, of being tired of the job and its endless crises. Polls suggest many people are fatigued with him, too.

Microgrids Offer Community Solution to Electricity Challenge

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You may have heard of microgrids in passing, maybe at a town meeting or when the future of your electricity supply is under discussion. Mostly, they aren’t headliners like data centers.

However, microgrids are becoming an important part of the future electric infrastructure. They provide a valve to release some of the pressure building up to supply more electricity to data centers and transportation.

Burns & McDonnell, an architecture, engineering and construction firm, figures that by 2030, 50 percent of in-city deliveries will be made with electric vehicles of all types, and these will have to be charged daily.

There are 700 microgrids operating in the United States, and 7,000 are planned or under construction. While they got off to something of a slow start, they are now going full-speed ahead.

Originally, microgrids were seen as appropriate for military bases, college campuses, and other uses with a defense or social purpose, or for remote locations far from the grid.

Utilities were cool or actively hostile to them, although it can be argued that the first microgrid was established by Thomas Edison in Manhattan.

One utility executive said to me four years ago, “What is it about ‘micro’ that the promoters don’t understand?” Now utilities are beginning to embrace microgrids as part of the solution, not a raid on their customer base.

A microgrid, as explained by the futurist-entrepreneur Chase Weir, CEO of Distributed Sun and its spinoff truCurrent, is a way of bringing “kilowatt-hour liquidity” to the electricity industry, smoothing out the periods when demand meets maximum capacity, often beginning as the sun sets.

It is a self-contained electric generation and localized distribution entity, using storage, renewables, and, at times, traditional generation to create a grid that can operate either independently of the national grid or be connected to it. It is usually separated from but linked to a utility.

Oisin O’Brien, senior director of commercial solutions at truCurrrent, walked me through the dynamics of a microgrid that the company is building for a large food distribution company in Northern California.

Its assignment was to develop a charging station for 30 Daimler electric-tractor trailers used for food distribution. The challenge: To provide 2 megawatts of power for charging the Class 8 trucks during largely off-peak hours. Each truck has a 200-mile range on a single charge and must be charged daily.

On this project, O’Brien explained, truCurrent is working closely with the local utility, PG&E. “We were able to harness the utility’s flexible service program,” he said.

The full power plant — which is awaiting permission to operate from PG&E — will team 800 kilowatts of solar power with battery storage to create a contained system.

Currently, solar collectors are being installed on the facility’s roof, but two dozen of the company’s trucks are already using the charging points in the parking lot. The 180-kilovolt (which equals 1,000 volts) fast chargers can fully recharge a truck in three to four hours.

This first-of-a-kind pilot is remarkable in that it has brought “speed to power,” going from contracting to charging in 13 months. It meets the food distribution company’s need to charge when they need to, provides resilient backup and load flexibility, and provides a price hedge at a time of record-high diesel prices.

“Our solutions are only becoming more valuable as cost, reliability and power availability worsens,” Weir said.

According to O’Brien, truCurrent has plans to deploy microgrids nationwide, using a system of turnkey installations where the infrastructure is owned and operated by the local company or the community, but the planning, procurement and installation is provided by truCurrent.

“This project was driven by regulatory pressures in California, the company’s sustainability targets, and the increasing economic benefits with updated analysis, showing lower operating costs for electric fleets compared to diesel (pre-Iran war calculations),” O’Brien said.

The truCurrent project is for transportation usage, but there is a growing demand for microgrid deployment in suburbs and even in apartment complexes.

It is an example of Weir’s vision for the electrical grid of the future, which, in addition to liquidity and speed, must be designed for abundance and affordability.

The project “turned every challenge into an advantage for the developer, the customer, the utility and capital markets,” Weir said.

Shared prosperity with a microgrid: What’s not to like?

The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose

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Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions. But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,000,000,000,000. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble.

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” 

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

News organizations need to be owned by news people, like Ted Turner, Bill Paley and, yes, Rupert Murdoch.

AI Is Interested in You, So You’d Best Be Interested in It

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AI is everywhere. It is now affecting how people do their jobs and those jobs themselves.

The future is clearly with those who have found a way of making themselves indispensable by using AI, and not with those who resist or actively fight it. You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.

Even in jobs considered safe from automation, AI is shaping daily work, from running a hospital nurses’ station to helping an electrician check available replacement equipment.

I mention those two jobs because they are the most frequently listed as being secure and unlikely to be taken over by AI. That doesn’t mean they won’t be touched by the unseen hand of AI. It is everywhere and on the move.

Graduates now leaving the colleges and universities are having a tough time finding work. Many workers who thought they were set for life are refining their resumes, particularly those in the computer field.

Meta, owner of Facebook, has laid off 8,000 workers, and an additional 7,000 will be reassigned to AI-focused positions.

The job market isn’t only reflecting AI doing the work across industries, but also the immeasurable hesitation of companies to hire for jobs that may later be taken over by AI. “ Better to hold on and see” is a common attitude in firms that aren’t sure whether AI will, in fact, help them meet their needs.

Many savants in the AI industry have warned of job losses across the employment landscape as AI takes hold. These include Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Open AI’s Sam Altman. The Economist writes about a job “catastrophe.”

My view, shared by many I have interviewed, is that there will be a sharp global drop in employment, followed by a post-revolution expansion of employment that allows for the flourishing of AI and its benefits. Open AI’s Altman has predicted a similar scenario, but he hasn’t identified when the upturn might occur — in years or decades?

There are those who believe that governments will have to provide a universal basic income to compensate for the inroads of AI. Unlikely.

The first impediment is that all the advanced countries are already spending beyond their means, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Where will the new money come from with fewer people paying taxes?

Affordability is only the first argument against a universal basic income. People are built to work. Without work, they get into trouble, deteriorate or go mad. Possibly all three.

The United Kingdom, which has many programs for the unemployed, is something of a laboratory on how not to help the jobless. A lot of people there simply haven’t tried working in a long time.

Collectively, UK social assistance programs are known as “benefits” and extend well beyond a substitute for a paycheck. They take care of everything from assisting with rent to, in some cases, assisting with entertainment.

My experience in interviewing and just knowing people who haven’t worked for a long time is that they are rootless, critical of the system that supports them and inclined to take drugs, drink or fall victim to mental illness.

Instead of state subsidies, we will likely see the gig economy boom — and it should be helped — and human creativity will flourish with it.

For that to happen, the political leadership, Democratic or Republican, needs to catch up with the fact that we may be entering into a new economic order where the old idea of employment is reduced, and waves of individual entrepreneurs are unleashed, doing everything from, say, creating new musical instruments to designing new homes from waste products, to restoring forests without uniformity.

Omar Hatamleh, who has written five books on AI, said that the challenge of AI is that it is exponential, and we think linearly. My hope is that the AI upheaval will inadvertently convert us from linear to exponential thinkers.

The political class has been notably missing from the AI fray aside from mumbling about regulating AI, which won’t help job creation.

It seems that making gig work easier and safer might be a good beginning. All the indications are that more of us will be working for ourselves going forward. The gig worker ought to be able to easily purchase Social Security insurance and access its benefits, including retirement.

It is a new time for the human race. It would be wonderful to feel that the politicians were aware of it.

We are in a political year, and AI isn’t a subject being debated, let alone eliciting new ideas. AI won’t wait.

The Woman Behind Trump’s Overnight Truth Social Raging

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President Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likes to say that his administration is the most transparent in history. Possibly, she is right.

That is, if you think letting it all hang out is the kind of transparency Leavitt has in mind.

Certainly, it all hangs out in a way we have never seen in Washington. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a kind of television studio where he insults the press, talks to foreign leaders and, on occasion, berates them (Ukraine, South Africa and Canada) in front of the press.

Then there is the president’s late-night posting on Truth Social, when a meteor shower of invective, scorn, misinformation, disinformation, self-adulation, and allegations, interspersed with policy declarations, reveals him unedited. In those posts, he has urged colonizing Greenland, taking over Canada and, recently, adding Venezuela as the 51st state.

All of it set about with capital letters, exclamation points and AI-generated pictures — some of the most offensive ones have included Trump as Jesus, the Obamas as apes and, more recently, Illinois Gov. JD Pritzker gorging on an enormous hamburger.

The insults keep coming, accusing enemies and even his predecessors of being weak, having low IQs and, of course, being “losers.” In this scathing and self-aggrandizing stream, some are even traitors, including former President Barack Obama. Arrest him!

It is a bravura performance without equal. It is also hugely popular with diehard devotees of the president. His account on Truth Social has 12.5 million subscribers. One night recently, there were 55 posts — some clearly composed and some forwarded from right-wing sources, alleging conspiracies, malfeasance or trumpeting Trump.

Journalists assigned to read them have called them variously rampages, rants, wild sprees and storms. But read them, they must.

This is Trump in a stream of consciousness, unvarnished, and an essential source of news because what the president of the United States says is news.

Traces of varnishing have been appearing: The number of spelling mistakes, bizarre word formations and grammatical errors has gone down, even as the volume has accelerated.

The Wall Street Journal has revealed the unseen hand on the keyboard. It is the hand of Natalie Harp, the president’s personal assistant, an influential but unsung force in the White House.

Harp, according to the Journal, scours fringe news and social media for repostable comments and produces AI-generated illustrations. She then hands them to Trump. He selects and adds them to his own comments, and a post is born.

Sometimes the posting is feverish. The night the Iran War began, there were more than 90 posts.

Harp, 34, is the epitome of a Christian conservative, coming from a religious family in California and attending two Christian-right universities, Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. She came to Trump’s attention when she was reporting and hosting for the ultra-conservative television network One America News. He asked her to join his presidential campaign.

Don’t think that Trump and Harp’s overnight spewing is wasted. He has all those followers on Truth Social, but his real strength is that the mainstream media is obliged to quote some of his comments daily.

What Trump says on Truth Social is also heard around the world. It isn’t just journalists who follow it; nations have to pay attention. In capitals from Tehran to Moscow, London to Beijing, Trump-raging is essential reading.

The Trump Show, for that is what it is, is a radical departure from how presidents have traditionally communicated with the public. Trump posts directly, sometimes without regard for how his words will be received.

It used to be that speeches were the window through which the world could see how an American president was thinking. They were crafted, agonized over, passed around, redrafted and sometimes delivered with last-minute handwritten additions or subtractions by the president.

They were policy documents for the present and the future. With Trump, it is the improvisations that inform or confuse.

Presidential speeches through the years have given us history’s milestones, whether it was Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address or FDR’s First Inaugural Address.

Who can forget the speeches of JFK in Berlin, Reagan at the Berlin Wall or Obama in Cairo?

With Trump, it is the firehose delivery that is remembered, especially in overnight posts. Transparent?