Welcome to The CULTURED Book Club, a monthly read selected by our editors that helps parse through the issues of our time. This September, we turn our attention to End Times Fascism, a critical diagnosis of our current political fatalism. How does today’s brand of fascism differ from its antecedents? In the new book, bestselling author Naomi Klein and writer and documentarian Astra Taylor describe an apocalyptic political movement that, rather than promise to save us all from end times, plans to buy the wealthy out of the current polycrisis. (They’re headed to space.) In the below excerpt, Klein and Taylor take us through President Donald Trump’s second-term alignment with the tech elite, who have set environmental stability up as the necessary tradeoff in the race for artificial intelligence. (Plus: after you’ve read the below, stay tuned for our deep-dive into the book with Klein and Taylor.)
It was JD Vance who sealed the deal between MAGA and Silicon Valley, finishing the job his mentor Peter Thiel had started. In June 2024, when the ambitious young senator was still angling to be Trump’s running mate, he orchestrated a fundraising dinner for Donald Trump in San Francisco. On that fateful night, tech heavyweights gathered at the mansion of David Sacks, the future AI and crypto czar, to wine and dine with the once and future president. They stressed their dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s crackdown on the crypto market, and its early attempts to regulate AI.
Most consequentially, they put their case for a massive bet on AI into the language Trump would appreciate. America needed to dominate, be number one, beat China. And the best part of all, deregulated AI and crypto sectors would burn unfathomable amounts of gas and coal, which would greatly benefit Trump’s beloved fossil-fuel industry, a key source of contributions to his campaign. If Trump got on board the anti-woke, energy- guzzling AI rocket ship these men were financing, they would be the best—and richest—friends any politician could dream of.
Trump, erstwhile foe of Big Tech, took the deal. He told the crowd that he, unlike Joe Biden, would lift regulations on crypto and AI and supply the energy-intensive industries with all the power they needed. “Fossil fuel is the only way to do it,” Trump reportedly told the crowd at Sacks’s mansion, adding that “solar and wind just can’t cut it.” The fundraiser netted $12 million on the spot, and unlocked many millions more. A month later, Trump picked Vance as his running mate.
A week after his dinner-party conversion, Donald Trump provided a rather startling window into the casual attitude he took toward the existential risks of the technology he was suddenly evangelizing. It occurred on Impaulsive, a popular podcast hosted by the pro wrestler and professional provocateur Logan Paul, alongside his friend Mike Majlak. Surrounded by MAGA hats and bottles of Paul’s own energy drink, Trump told the hosts he was committed to unleashing AI, and then outlined with a chilling enthusiasm how easily it could end up destroying the world.
After describing how realistic deepfakes can be, he imagined launching a nuclear attack with a video message. “If you’re the president of the United States and you announce that thirteen missiles have been sent,” he mused, the enemy country would have no way to dis-cern whether the video was real or a forgery. Trump even turned to the camera and, as if to make a future deepfake easier to generate, said, “We have just sent thirteen nuclear missiles … and they will hit their targets in twelve minutes and fifty-nine seconds.”
He explained to the hosts, “I asked Elon [Musk]: ‘Is there any way that like Russia or China can say that that’s not really President Trump?’ He said there is no way.” There would be no time to verify. “So, what do they do when they see this, right? They have maybe a counterattack. It’s so dangerous in that way.”
Well, yes. But rather than explaining how he would regulate against that outcome, Trump just shrugged, saying, “In another way, it’s so incredible.” Some people believe AI “takes over the human race,” he went on—and then shrugged that off too. “So, let’s see how it all works out.” The podcast hosts, notorious for their own high-risk behaviors, were visibly rattled. Shrugging off Armageddon is deranged behavior, betraying a total lack of empathy and an indifference to life. In many ways, that’s just Donald Trump. But as his mention of Musk made clear, it also represents the general attitude of the people leading the AI charge. Musk, for one, has said that if AI goes very badly, he’d “at least like to be alive to see it happen.”
Since his return to the White House, Trump has broken many campaign promises that were important to his working-class base. He has started new wars, sending the cost of living shooting skyward. But when it comes to the pledges he made to Silicon Valley, he has been a man of his word. For its first year and a half in office, in executive orders and policy papers, the language deployed by the Trump administration was indistinguishable from the quasi-religious manifestos churned out in Silicon Valley.
A document titled “America’s AI Action Plan,” put out by the president’s office six months after inauguration, states: “Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people,” predicting, “it will enable altogether new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”
As promised, upon retaking office, Trump immediately ripped up Biden’s modest AI regulations, declared a national energy emergency, and dismantled supports for renewable energy. On the campaign trail, Trump had described AI as an “electricity-eating monster” (a phrase meant as a compliment) and he was determined to feed the beast with massive amounts of gas and “beautiful” coal.
On his first full day back in office, Trump also announced Project Stargate, an AI infrastructure initiative in partnership with Oracle and OpenAI budgeted at $500 billion, almost twice as expensive as the Apollo program, adjusted for inflation. He also signed a series of executive orders aimed at speeding up the construction of data-center infrastructure—everything from loans, to committing federal land and resources, to fast-tracked environmental reviews.
Under cover of these national emergency declarations and waived regulations, no part of the country has been left untouched by the data-center rollout, or the resource extraction supplying those centers with energy, metals, and minerals. Making the United States the “AI capital of the world” is now an official priority of the Environmental Protection Agency.
During Trump’s fateful first eighteen months back at the helm, the US government both paved the way for this frenzy and also directly invested in it, signaling to markets that this industry is too big to fail. Officials secured stakes in a growing list of domestic and international mining companies vital to Silicon Valley. The Commerce Department also took a piece of Intel, the American chip giant, and struck a deal for a potential future equity share of Westinghouse, the nuclear power company. Meanwhile the Energy Department provided a $1 billion loan to restart one of the reactors at Three Mile Island, the site of the infamous 1 979 nuclear meltdown and radiation leak, to power Microsoft’s data centers.
Beyond direct subsidies and waived federal regulations, the Trump administration has also helped its new friends in tech in other ways. In the absence of federal regulation, states including California, Colorado, New York, Texas, Tennessee, and Michigan have made moves to rein in AI, including by requiring tech companies to disclose safety standards, better protect children, and guard against deepfakes.
Unsurprisingly, these democratic exercises enraged the titans of Silicon Valley. “A 50-state patchwork is a startup killer,” Marc Andreessen fumed on X. Within weeks of his complaint, the administration came to the rescue. In December 2025, Trump issued an executive order that declared most of those state and local laws a threat to “America’s global A. I. dominance,” banning them and subjecting them to legal action from Washington. With then AI and crypto czar David Sacks at his side, Trump pronounced that the rules on AI would come from only “one source”—the Oval Office. And those rules would be: keep going wild.
Every true gold rush needs its Wild West, a frontier zone of exception where the usual rules and laws do not apply. And in those key months, that is precisely what Trump delivered. The trouble with these kinds of frenzies, of course, is that they invariably fuel irrationality, and so it is with the AI bubble. The vast build-out Trump has accelerated sits atop fundamental economic instability.
According to estimates from McKinsey, global spending on data centers could reach $7 trillion by 2030. In the first three months of 2026, AI companies “shattered” the previous year’s fundraising records, raking in almost $300 billion in investment. Much of that money went to Altman’s OpenAI—no matter that the company’s best projections do not forecast a positive cash flow until 2029, and many analysts consider even that optimistic. In the words of analysts at Deutsche Bank: “No startup in history has operated with losses on anything approaching this scale. We are firmly in uncharted territory.”
All of this has been a massive boon to the chip maker Nvidia, which in 2025 became the first company in history to surpass a valuation of $5 trillion, more than the GDP of any nation except the United States and China. So it’s hardly surprising that Nvidia has plowed billions back into AI companies in the hopes of keeping the bubble going, adding to a thicket of questionable accounting practices and circular deals: OpenAI buys chips from Nvidia, and Nvidia pledges to sink money back into OpenAI; OpenAI buys cloud computing from Oracle, which buys chips from Nvidia, which invests in OpenAI; Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI while both Microsoft and Amazon have invested billions in Anthropic, which uses Amazon chips and relies on cloud infrastructure from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
None of this can hide the simple fact that for all the trillions in AI investments to make any kind of sense, sales for AI products would need to be in the trillions of dollars themselves. Just to pay off the interest on their capital expenditures, “you need roughly $800 billion of profit,” according to calculations by IBM’s CEO, Arvind Krishna. There was, he put it bluntly, “no way” for the numbers to make sense. And time is short, because the data centers are filled with Nvidia chips that have an estimated shelf life of about five years.
This is the house of cards that Trump has bet his presidency on. In 2025, AI-related companies made up an estimated 80 percent of US earnings gains, driving otherwise desultory economic growth, despite the lack of any clear path for scaled revenue generation. The trouble, of course, is that most people remain highly ambivalent about AI. A 2025 Pew poll, for example, found that half of adults believed the technology would worsen people’s ability to form meaningful relationships and think creatively. Strikingly, young people—who reported more direct exposure to and familiarity with AI than their elders—were significantly more pessimistic. Only 17 percent of adults said they believed AI would have a positive impact on the United States over the next two decades.
This persistent unpopularity is a major reason many warn that AI is a dangerous bubble. It’s also why Trump signed an executive order in June 2026 encouraging “frontier” AI companies to voluntarily submit their models for federal review—a move that was more public relations than regulation. The same month he floated the possibility of a financial “partnership” that would force the American people to take equity stakes in leading AI firms. “By doing that, they’re going to like it better,” Trump said, as though using public money to prop up over-inflated stock would allay AI skepticism.
Excerpted from End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. All rights reserved.
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