Nvidia scandal: worse than an affair with a spy

Brian Lehrer (0:05)

From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast. It's Friday the 13th, November 13th.

Did democracy itself win the midterm elections? On Tuesday's show, Fareed Zakaria, a close watcher of democracy and authoritarianism around the world, said, maybe not so much. Mostly people just didn't like Donald Trump. If inflation was lower, they would have overlooked the plunder and the authoritarian drift. At least many of them would. We'll replay a clip. But today we'll ask another close watcher of democracy, Anne Applebaum, author of the book Autocracy, Inc. and host of the podcast series, Autocracy in America. The new season of her podcast opens with the line, we've just had the most consequential midterm elections in modern history. Americans clearly voted for a different kind of government. So does she think the voters gave democracy itself a historic W? We'll find out.

But Anne also maintains what she calls a kleptocracy tracker, and a company she wrote about in October was, yes, NVIDIA. The thing is, the autocracy and corruption watch around Trump and CEO Jensen Wong was actually much bigger than the affair with a suspected Chinese spy that's making headlines now. It looks to me like it was the context for the damage to the world the affair might cause. At least I'll ask about that with Anne Applebaum, who was paying attention to the big picture before the Salacious stuff drew in everyone else. She joins us now. Anne, we continue to appreciate your work. Welcome back to WNYC.

Anne Applebaum (1:46)

Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer (1:48)

Can we start with NVIDIA? Your kleptocracy tracker tied the company and CEO Jensen Wong to Trump's White House Ballroom Project. What was the connection there and why should we care?

Anne Applebaum (2:00)

So the CEO of NVIDIA was one of several tech leaders who have gone out of their way to pay money into Trump's ballroom project, into other projects in the hope of getting good treatment, getting good deals for their companies. And maybe as we now know, I mean, this is this is just me speculating, but maybe in order to get the administration to look the other way when NVIDIA engaged in in questionable sales of chips to China.

There's another layer of context to this story that I think hasn't been brought out enough, which is that there is an arrangement now between NVIDIA and the US government whereby NVIDIA gives a portion of its profits to the United States, which is a very, very unusual, one might even say not especially capitalist or American practice. But Trump was able to put pressure on the company in order to get the company to do some kind of profit sharing, revenue sharing with the United States. The question that has to be asked then is, it's not just about the CEO having an affair with a spy. The question has to be asked, what exactly were the interests that Trump and people around him had in this company? What were they getting out of it? Something that we've never had to ask about any administration, at least not in modern history, before, which is, were there personal interests? Did Howard Lutnick's companies or his family's companies have any interest in Nvidia? Did the Trump family have any interest in this story as well? I mean, for the first time, we have a lot of officials who've been making decisions based not on the interests of America, not on American security, but on their own interests. And again, I don't know that that happened here.

I'm not making that claim. I'm just saying that it has to be asked because it has been the case in many foreign policy decisions especially, but also domestic policy decisions that other interests have taken priority. And I hope that is explored over the next few weeks in the context of this story.

Brian Lehrer (4:09)

And there may be yet another incident, Wong attending a million dollar a plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago. And I've seen it reported that at that dinner, after donating a million dollars to wherever it would go on Trump's behalf, at that dinner he persuaded Trump to postpone restrictions on chip sales to China.

Anne Applebaum (4:33)

Right. So the question has to be asked, was he paying for that decision? In effect, was he making these contributions to the ballroom, to the dinner, to Trump's other projects? Was he doing that in hopes of a favorable treatment of his company?

That's a very important part of the story.

Brian Lehrer (4:55)

The other thing that you brought up, Trump getting a cut for the US government of those chip sales, seems like a socialist thing to do, or funny enough, a communist China thing to do, right? A partially state-owned company, in effect, with the government having a stake in its profits.