Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. President Donald Trump, this past week, has had a number of Big Tech CEOs and corporate grandees, in general, meet at the White House. He had them all around the table, and they were the richest and most innovative people in America.
He had Bill Gates, the former Microsoft CEO. There was Tim Cook, the current director of Apple—CEO of Apple. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Facebook, he was there. Sam Altman, the artificial intelligence guru. Supposedly, Elon Musk was asked but couldn’t make it. I don’t know why he couldn’t make it. In addition, they had the Google people there. They had David Sacks, the Trump czar of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.
What was behind all of this? And I think what was behind all of this—Trump was sending a message to America and to these CEOs.
Remember, all these CEOs are liberal, with very few exceptions. Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million to stop Trump in the 2020 election. So, they’re no friends, necessarily, of Donald Trump, and yet here they are around the table. Why? What’s going on?
And I think he’s saying that the Europeans are going after all of you to impose new multibillion-dollar taxes on people who use your products in Europe—in the EU sphere. The Chinese are even approaching, not just parity, but superiority to us in things like accessible artificial intelligence, in robotics, and these have national security implications.
So, what he was saying to all of you: “Here’s the quid, and here’s the pro quo. If you do the following, if you do not outsource, if you do not offshore, if you try to invest billions of dollars in the United States and you create jobs and you produce these products here, I will do the following. I will try to green-light your investments, productions, use of greater energy sources. I’ll try to get rid of the red tape to the extent that I can. I will tell the Europeans that if you try to unilaterally tax or overregulate or censor my companies”—I don’t mean Trump’s own, but the companies he’s representing as the president of the United States—“then we’re gonna do the same to you.”
He’s telling the Chinese, “We’re going to compete with you, and there’s going to be certain things that you cannot import from these companies.”
So, it’s kind of a quid pro quo when he brings in people that are hostile to him, but he doesn’t care as long as they’re patriotic, they’re pro-American, they’re gonna use their brilliance and capital and expertise to advance the United States’ security and prosperity.
This is very reminiscent of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1939, ’40, ’41.
When World War II broke out, we did not enter. Remember that for over a year and a half, our army was smaller than Portugal’s—19th in the world. We had about 300,000 people in the military. Japan, Germany, and Italy—our eventual enemies—they had almost 6 million.
Roosevelt’s New Deal had not worked very well. It was 1938. We had a big recession, 18% unemployment. So, he said, “We’re going to build weapons.” He had Rep. Carl Vinson pass naval procurement acts, and then he brought in people like Mark Zuckerberg; like Tim Cook; like Bill Gates; William Knudsen, the head of General Motors at the time; Henry Ford, head of Ford Motor; Henry Kaiser, Kaiser Steel.
He brought in a number of people, and he called it the War Production Board, the Office of Production Management, the National Advisory Commission. And he said to these CEOs, “I’m not gonna do the New Deal with you. I’m not gonna try to manage the economy. If you will follow my directive, this is the quotas projected, levels of expenditure and production. We need hundreds of thousands of planes. We need tanks. We don’t have any. Go to it, make money, but arm us quickly.” And the rest was history.
Henry Kaiser was producing a 10,000-ton Liberty ship every three or four days in his West Coast shipyards he created. Henry Ford was producing a B-24, one an hour, at the huge Willow Run aircraft production facility in Michigan. William Knudsen was overseeing the transition of every major company in the United States into a war production company.
And the result, when the war was over, we had created 300,000 airplanes. We had more airplanes than every air force in the world combined. We had created over 10,000 ships. The U.S. Navy alone was larger than all the navies in the world. The gross domestic product of the United States was larger than Russia’s, Germany, Italy, Japan, or the British Empire. All the belligerents together could not produce what these men did in three or four years.
I could go on, but it was a story of going from basically being unarmed to being the most armed and deadly military in the history of civilization.
So, what Donald Trump is trying to do is what FDR tried to do: Bring people who were ideologically opposed—and all these CEOs were conservative. They did not like FDR, they did not like the New Deal, and yet they worked with him. These CEOs don’t like Trump. They’re opposed to him ideologically, but they have one thing in common: they’re patriotic.
And maybe, just maybe, Trump can do for the United States in these emerging, absolutely essential fields of artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, robotics, genetic engineering, maybe he can do what FDR did in the War Production Board, and famous names like Kaiser, Ford, and Knudsen.
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