In conversation with President Trump

The interview came out of a Silicon Valley fundraising circle with direct access to Trump. David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya had hosted a fundraiser weeks earlier, and Sacks said the Winklevoss twins were about to donate $1 million each in Bitcoin.

Trump promised automatic green cards for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, including two-year schools, saying the change would begin on “day one.” He framed it as talent retention: graduates forced home can build companies in India or China that could have been created in America. (Reuters)

Trump explicitly said he would not support a national abortion ban and would leave the issue to the states. He also endorsed exceptions for rape, incest, and danger to the mother’s life, while acknowledging that state votes were sometimes producing more abortion-rights-friendly outcomes than expected.

Trump guaranteed he would not send U.S. troops into Ukraine even if France or other European countries did so. He argued that prospective Ukrainian NATO membership had long been unacceptable to Russia and blamed Biden’s rhetoric around NATO for helping provoke the conflict.

On the federal debt, Trump offered growth and efficiency rather than a detailed deficit-reduction plan, with his clearest cut being abolition of the Education Department and roughly halving federal education dollars. Friedberg later noted education is only about 3% of the federal budget and said the broader spending problem remained unanswered.

Trump described tariffs as geopolitical leverage, not merely trade policy, and proposed reciprocal tariffs against countries that tax U.S. goods. He specifically linked tariffs to defending the dollar’s reserve role, while the hosts noted that combining broad tariffs with tax cuts could worsen inflation without large spending cuts.

Trump said Silicon Valley conversations convinced him that leading in AI would require roughly two to three times today’s electricity supply, and he was open to nuclear power. He favored smaller, standardized reactors over giant bespoke plants, arguing that U.S. nuclear construction had been crippled by extreme cost overruns.

Trump said aides persuaded him not to release all JFK records during his first term, but promised to release the remainder early in another term. When asked whether the CIA killed Kennedy, he did not endorse that claim; he said the CIA was “probably behind” the effort urging him to withhold records.