My take is that Trump (in the second term) appointed people he thought had expertise to the relevant departments but not to regulating them. He wanted the Secretaries to juice the economy from the Secretary position.
That doesn't, in itself, require corruption. But Trump clearly signaled that corruption would be overlooked so long as it was convenient for his admin (very similar to the Putin-oligarch model).
And taking Jensen down was another example of a Putin style oligarch model. The only reason for him to step down so suddenly was threat of prison.
[−]cmrdporcupine · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:41 UTC ·
link
I half-heartedly wonder how much of what's going on here also involves punishment for Huang's wholehearted defense of open weight models, the purchase of Hugging Face, the release of the Nemotron series, etc.
When you had Lutnick and Bessent and Anthropic and OpenAI explicitly making arguments in the other direction... And e.g. Anthropic's obscene IPO and their success potentially undermined by Chinese (or other, EU etc) open models... Huang's defense of open weights starts to look like outright "disloyalty" in a way the Trump regime has punished heavily in the past.
And given the shift in power after the midterms they may have wanted to execute on this now before they lose control of congress.
Trump doesn’t recognize or believe in competence because he has never experienced it. He thinks everyone is a bullshitter like himself. The only qualifications he considered for his cabinet was loyalty and popularity in the political entertainment industry.
That doesn't, in itself, require corruption. But Trump clearly signaled that corruption would be overlooked so long as it was convenient for his admin (very similar to the Putin-oligarch model).
When you had Lutnick and Bessent and Anthropic and OpenAI explicitly making arguments in the other direction... And e.g. Anthropic's obscene IPO and their success potentially undermined by Chinese (or other, EU etc) open models... Huang's defense of open weights starts to look like outright "disloyalty" in a way the Trump regime has punished heavily in the past.
And given the shift in power after the midterms they may have wanted to execute on this now before they lose control of congress.