At dinner parties and family gatherings, I’m often deluged with opinions that President Donald Trump is the worst thing that ever happened to America and a major contributor to its decline.
Almost in the same breath, these friends, relatives and acquaintances note that I run a political website and ask my view of Trump. I tell them LACP is nonpartisan and favors ideas over ideology, and that Trump, in my eyes, is a mixed bag who has done some good things and some bad ones.
This being highly progressive, Democratic Los Angeles, that answer usually brings out the Trump haters. They look at me sideways and all but demand to know what Trump has done right. Whatever I say, they tend to shout down.
It’s hard to shout me down in an At Witt’s End column. So without further ado, here is one major Trump wrong and one major right.
On the wrong side, Trump’s immigration policy is hurting Angelenos, particularly Latino Angelenos. Few questioned the need to secure the southern border or to go after violent criminals among the undocumented. But the administration’s enforcement has gone, and keeps going, much too far.
I recently met a Nicaraguan American woman in Glendale who runs a small cosmetic tattooing business. She told me she had to take a part-time job to stay afloat because many of her clients are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being picked up by immigration agents.
As one line I’ve heard puts it, nobody objects to ICE going after a gangbanger. The problem is when it goes after the gardener.
The undocumented immigrants I’ve met here are overwhelmingly hardworking, family-centered and upwardly mobile people who buy into the American dream. The undocumented, particularly those who have been here for many years, should be given a path to citizenship and should not have to live in fear of ICE. The Trump administration should be taken to task for failing them.
On the right side, I agree with the Wall Street Journal’s coverage and editorial page that Trump smartly convened AI leaders this week to sign what he called a “morally binding” compact to police themselves, the White House Accord on Super Intelligence.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg drafted the accord after raising the idea with House Speaker Mike Johnson at a White House state dinner, according to Semafor. The one-page accord commits signers to robust internal controls, multiple layers of auditing and independent board oversight, and Trump likened it to a constitution for AI. Signers included Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and xAI’s Elon Musk. Microsoft and Amazon executives also attended the lunch but didn’t sign the agreement.
Critics call the accord toothless because it can’t be legally enforced. I see a far-reaching, positive development. Those who want AI heavily regulated are shortsighted, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wants to ban superintelligence outright and pause advanced AI development, and former President Barack Obama, who says voluntary industry standards won’t be enough. Bad actors like China will not stop developing their own AI, and the best safeguard is American entrepreneurship.
As the Journal’s editorial noted, companies have strong business incentives to pace and police themselves to avoid costly lawsuits and government enforcement. Trump put it more bluntly this week, reportedly saying: “I have a guardrail. You know what the guardrail is? The Department of Justice.”
Neither view will win me many friends at the next dinner party. But that’s the point of ideas over ideology. You judge the policy, not the man.
