Opinion - Trump must stop the AI bloodbath before it's too late

Yahoo

5 hours ago

A white-collar bloodbath is coming. Not in theory. Not in ten years. It's already begun.
Tens of millions of entry-level jobs — gone. Mid-level coders, paralegals, junior analysts, HR coordinators, customer service agents, entire rungs of the labor force about to be vaporized by artificial intelligence — not because it's more ethical or more productive, but because it's cheaper, quieter and doesn't complain.
Unless President Trump acts fast, America's economic foundation — work itself — will be hollowed out and handed over to a class of unelected engineers and Silicon Valley kingmakers who believe your relevance should be determined by a model's capabilities.
This is not paranoia. It's happening now. And the architects aren't hiding it.
The people building this technology — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google — aren't sugarcoating the situation. They've run the simulations, watched the user metrics and tested the capabilities. AI is about to gut entire sectors of the economy from the inside out, beginning with those least able to absorb the blow: young Americans trying to get a foothold in a career, middle-class parents working clerical jobs to keep food on the table, veterans retraining to survive in a digital economy that shifts faster than policy can blink.
This is where the president must make a choice that actually matters: Will he defend the American worker, or will he let Silicon Valley redraw the economic order while the middle class is shoved silently off the map?
Trump built his MAGA movement on a promise — not just to revive the economy but to restore dignity through work. To bring back jobs. To make labor meaningful again. To tell the forgotten men and women of this country that they matter, because what they do matters. That mission now faces a threat unlike any we've seen. Not foreign competition. Not global offshoring. But extinction-by-algorithm.
And as bleak as it looks, it isn't too late. Not yet.
The federal government still has tools, and the presidency still has teeth. But it will take nerve. It will take a president willing to do something rare in this moment: to say no. No to unchecked automation, no to the idea that human labor is an inefficiency to be optimized away, no to the lie that faster always means better, and cheaper always means smarter.
Trump doesn't need to burn Silicon Valley to the ground. He just needs to remind it who owns the rails. If a company takes money from the federal government through contracts, grants, subsidies or loans, it should not be allowed to quietly fire American workers and replace them with bots. No taxpayer should fund their own obsolescence. If these companies want the benefits of public money, then they answer to the public. And the public has a right to know who's getting replaced, when and why. Every company automating away jobs should be forced to disclose it, openly and in real time. Let the American people see which corporations are killing jobs while posting record profits. If they're proud of their efficiency, let them stand by it. If they're going to replace workers, let them say it with their chest. Enough with the silent rollbacks and euphemisms. Enough with the term 'augmented' when what you mean is 'deleted.' And if they insist on automating, fine. But they can pay for the damage. Every AI transaction, every commercial model use that replaces a real person's job, should be taxed. Not to fund some utopian universal income experiment, but to pay for something real: job retraining, trade schools, small-business grants for human-led enterprises. America isn't a testbed. It's a country. And it deserves policy that defends people, not models. And then there's the future. Not the tech future but the human one. We need a Federal Job Corps that actually builds futures again. Not a holding tank for the unemployed, but a launchpad for Americans ready to work in sectors AI can't touch: critical trades, skilled manufacturing, energy, health care, logistics, infrastructure. Real jobs. Real training. Real ladders. We cannot TikTok our way out of structural collapse. We cannot freelance our way into a middle class. If Trump wants to lead this nation through the next decade, he must be more than a fighter. He must be a builder of new ground. A president who understands that the battle ahead isn't just about borders or budgets, it's about value. What we value. Who we value. And whether the average American has any place left in the economy being written for them behind closed doors.
AI is not evil. But the hands controlling it aren't neutral. They're interested in profit, in scale, in optimization. Not patriotism, stability or sovereignty. Trump can put a stop to this. But he has to act now. Because if MAGA doesn't mean standing between the American worker and extinction-by-code, then it doesn't mean anything at all.
John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
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