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What Kinds of Risk Should the Government Take?
Trump is embracing the wrong Silicon Valley ideas
The second Trump administration has brought a culture war to Washington, but it’s not necessarily the one we thought we were getting.
Trump has long stoked conflict between his supporters, many of whom see themselves as “real Americans” with traditional, patriotic values, and the people he caricatures as “woke coastal elites,” who he accuses of changing American culture too radically. Whatever the accuracy of these labels, it does seem that a chasm has opened up between various groups of Americans: the “working class” vs. the “professional class,” rural vs. urban people, and those with college degrees vs. those without.
Never mind the fact that the champion of the less-educated, rural, and working-class American is a millionaire who lives in a Manhattan penthouse and brags about his Ivy League degree. Trump inspires great loyalty from some of his followers. Many Trump die-hards wear the criticisms of their opponents as a badge of honor — their T-shirts advertise that they’re “deplorables” who “voted for the felon.”
But, in a strange twist, Trump isn’t staffing the government with salt-of-the-earth people from the heartland. Instead, the shock troops of his government reform efforts are hotshot computer…