Eight Ways the New Administration Can Pursue a Post-Techlash Agenda
Trump’s relationship with the digital world has been much more personal. Few political leaders, if any, have used social media so effectively and extensively. Yet throughout his first term and the 2020 campaign, Trump increasingly resented the way he thought social media platforms were often biased against him. Then, after January 6, he was officially banned by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others, leading him to launch his own platform, Truth Social.
But during the 2024 campaign, the turnaround has been remarkable. In Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), Trump chose a running mate who has both venture capital and Silicon Valley experience, with close ties to Peter Thiel. Silicon Valley icons such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen came out strongly for Trump, providing important air cover for many lesser-known tech industry supporters. Mark Zuckerberg publicly admired Trump’s “badass” resilience and acknowledged that Meta did succumb to various government pressures. Perhaps most importantly, Musk used his 2022 purchase of Twitter to shift a major part of the social media landscape in Trump’s favor.
Looking ahead, Trump’s impressive victory will likely provide a respite from many aspects of the techlash that were high priorities of the Left and the Biden administration. There will be much less focus on issues such as assuring online privacy, blocking internet misinformation, reducing gender and racial biases, promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, limiting data-driven advertising, and regulating algorithmic operations. Given that Republicans will soon control all three branches of government, regulatory policy initiatives in these areas will mostly stay on the backburner.
The big question is to what extent the techlash from the right—spurred by media bias and censorship—will replace these concerns. At various times, Trump has seemed keen to punish his opponents; at other times, he has said success will be his retribution. If he mostly chooses the latter, there is much that can be done. There is a huge opportunity to change the technology narrative of recent years, making it less about fear, potential downsides and things to blame, and more about national development, competitiveness, and prosperity in an “America First” context.
A Post-Techlash Agenda
The need to end eight years of political/hi-tech antagonism and develop a closer, more bipartisan, and more productive relationship between Silicon Valley, Congress, and the executive branch can be seen across the following eight areas:
- Competing with China. Globalization has been very good for the U.S. tech industry, greatly expanding markets and substantially lowering costs. But because of the technology and military rivalry with China, that era is over. Big Tech will need to take more of an America-first approach whether the issue is national resiliency, domestic production, trade secrets, export controls, technology licensing, or supporting the U.S. military. These challenges will often be extremely sensitive and are a potential minefield of conflicting business risks and interests. However, U.S. technology giants will earn a great deal of good will if they are seen to be using some of their vast riches to support a pro-American agenda, while also helping to avoid an all-out trade war. Trump may well judge Big Tech by its support and behavior in in this area, since U.S.-China relations could easily define much of his presidency.
- Modernizing the military. Trump rarely talks about science, research, or innovation. What he does talk about is space and military leadership. This also happens to be the best area (much more than DOGE) to leverage the talents of Musk. Imagine Musk and other tech leaders pursuing the mission of U.S. military leadership in space, rockets, satellites, drones, iron domes, and robots, along with the associated systems, software, and AI. To do this, the Pentagon and Silicon Valley must work together much more closely. Sure, there would be business conflicts of interest, but such conflicts are already part of the military-industrial complex. As in the past, major military innovations will eventually spin off important U.S. commercial and consumer advances.
- Rebalancing relations with Europe. Trump will surely continue to scold Europe, reminding its leaders that they don’t spend nearly enough on their own defense, that they were foolish to become so dependent on Russian gas, that helping Ukraine is primarily their problem, and that they can’t expect American largess when they enjoy a $200 billion-plus per year bilateral trade surplus and continue to attack U.S. technology firms with abandon. These realities will be reinforced by Europe’s growing realization that becoming a “regulatory superpower” has done little to help now-moribund European economies, that Europe is now far behind the United States and China in advanced-technology innovation, and that any Trump tariffs will be hard to reciprocally counter. Taken together, these dynamics are a formula for hard feelings, which could easily result in further European actions against U.S. technology giants. Whether Trump would use the threat of tariffs to limit the worst of EU digital protectionism while then building a robust anti-China alliance remains to be seen.
- Incentivizing reshoring. The Biden and Trump approaches to bringing work back to America couldn’t be much more different. Biden has initiated or implemented huge subsidies in electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, renewable energy, batteries, and semiconductor production. Trump obviously prefers tariffs. Expect a high-stakes debate as to whether it makes more sense to provide billions of dollars to subsidize tech reshoring, or to take in billions by adding tariffs to imported hi-tech goods. Both strategies create incentives to move production to the United States or at least outside of China, but both also come with risks. Trump will surely implement tariffs to some extent. Whether he also tries to cancel some or all of the Biden subsidies remains unknown. Given the money involved, gaining bipartisan consensus will be difficult.
- Supporting AI. Whereas the Biden administration often talks about the risks of AI, Trump made occasional comments but otherwise said very little about the need to stay ahead of China. He has been neither an AI doomsayer nor an enthusiast. This suggests he will take a largely hands-off approach to AI unless there is a need to do otherwise, an approach strengthened by the fact that much-hyped AI fears such as election interference and mass unemployment have yet to materialize. A similar hands-off approach for cryptocurrencies also seems all but assured. Many in Silicon Valley will rejoice.
- Attracting talent. America’s STEM education remains insufficient, and while a shift back to more of a meritocracy in higher-ed admissions and hiring might help over the longer term, the innovation and reshoring goals described above will be much easier to realize if the United States effectively leverages the global talent base. Obviously, Trump’s immigration priority will be border security and the illegal migrations of recent years, but he could complement this with efforts to revitalize the United States as an international talent magnet. Many of the world’s leading scientists and engineers refuse to live in China, don’t want to move to India, and know they can make much more money in the United States than they can in Europe. The opportunity to make the global STEM community choose America first is vast.
- Scaling back antitrust. Given the business “lawfare” that Trump has experienced and his overall pro-billionaire mindset, the soon-to-be 47th president isn’t a natural antitrust enforcer, unless he has a personal grievance against a particular company. In this sense, the low-profile politics of Apple and Microsoft, and the recent fence mending by Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet all make perfect sense. It also seems certain that Trump will want to support Nvidia now that China has launched its antitrust attack against the AI chip leader. Among the existing Big Tech cases, Alphabet’s is currently the most serious. J.D. Vance’s support for sitting FTC Chair Lina Khan, and Trump’s appointments of Gail Slater to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division and Andrew Ferguson to chair the FTC (both of whom have expressed concerns about Big Tech’s market power) also suggest that this case might continue. However, Alphabet’s recent advances in quantum computing show why breaking up or otherwise weakening the U.S. tech giants remains a very bad idea. Hopefully, Trump will agree, especially given the overriding importance of effectively competing with China.
- Protecting children. All around the world, there are growing—if sometimes exaggerated—concerns about the potential harm to children from smartphones, video games, deepfakes, the Internet, and social media. The tech industry would be wise to be proactive in this important, sensitive, and politically potent area. One idea would be to engage with Vice President-elect Vance, given his pro-family mindset and connections to Silicon Valley. A supportive vice president could be a powerful defender of the tech industry if a significant child-protection strategy can be agreed upon and implemented.
Of course, this is just how things look now. As Mike Tyson famously said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Given the many volatilities in today’s world, events could change the dynamics in any or all of these areas. But one thing seems clear: The full fury of the techlash was unleashed by the Left when Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Russian bots got much of the blame for the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The Right then joined in, blaming social media censorship for contributing to Trump’s 2020 defeat. Hopefully, 2025 will see a third turn of the wheel, away from the Technology Fears and Scapegoats of the past, and toward the developmental and competitive challenges that America will face in the coming years.
