Trump: “China is Afraid of Google”
By Rebecca Grant: “Right now, China is afraid of Google,” former President Donald Trump said in Chicago on Oct. 15. Media outlets including the New York Times perked up at the acknowledgement that Google, as a tech innovator, is important in the fight against China.
From a national security perspective, this is a big deal. America’s leading tech companies are on the front lines of this vital global fight. Nobody else has the money and talent to prevail. Trump’s remarks in a wide-ranging interview were an important sign that this bipartisan policy consensus is gaining strength.
Trump on Google, full paragraph: “I give them a lot of credit. They’ve become such a power. Such a power. And you’ve got to give them credit for that. How they became a power is really the discussion. At the same time, it’s a very dangerous thing because we want to have great companies. We don’t want China to have these companies. Right now, China is afraid of Google. China is a very powerful, very smart group of people, I will tell you that…”
Tech companies are key to staying ahead of China because they are the innovators in the race for information dominance. As Lexington’s Dan Goure has written, the US government financed technology developments that kept the US ahead of the Soviet Union. With China, that’s not enough. The US is reliant on the advanced technologies produced by commercial companies and on their billions of dollars in annual research investment.
China has a plan for AI world domination. American freedom depends on American companies staying far, far ahead of China in AI and many other new technologies. Both the Biden and Trump administrations agreed on a priority list of critical and emerging technologies. Read more on America’s innovation edge here.
“They can’t believe that somebody finally got wise to them,” Trump said of China in this clip.
Read more of Trump’s bellyaching and banter with Google CEO Sundar Pichai here. Pichai informed the former President that “you’re the No. 1 person on all of Google for stories,” Trump recalled on Tuesday. “Most of them are bad stories,” Trump claims he said, “but these are minor details, right?”
This is the full interview hosted by the Economic Club of Chicago and Bloomberg.