Expert flags 'interesting' motivation behind Trump's billionaire theater

Tech reporter and podcaster Kara Swisher on Thursday said the sideshow at the White House on Wednesday in which President Donald Trump paraded fellow billionaires before the media was a choreographed message to the world.

The comments came during a roundtable discussion on CNN’s “NewsNight” revolving around Trump and his cozy relationship with billionaires including tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Swisher said that while Trump’s ultra-wealthy allies have their own motivations behind wanting to establish friendly ties with the president, “what Trump was doing” at yesterday’s White House event “was much more interesting.”

“These people had no interest in politics until they realized one, it's very cheap to buy politicians,” Swisher told guests. “Two, they started to get caught in the regulatory crosshairs that every other industry in history has had – they don't want any of that – and so what they're doing is they're saying, ‘It's really cheap to get into politics and have influence, and so you need proximity to this particular president, who is very transactional.’”

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She added that what Trump did was “he sat them there on television – he's a television president – and so he sat them there, and so they were all sitting there in a row…and he was saying, ‘look who I own, look who I control.’

“Absolutely,” Rudy Guiliani's attorney Arthur Aidala said.

“You’re totally right about that,” CNN’s Abby Phillip added.

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