A Republican congressman has broken party ranks to very publicly criticize Donald Trump in an opinion piece for the same newspaper the president seems to hate more than any other media outlet right now.
John Moolenaar, a GOP House Representative for Michigan who enthusiastically backed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” as a piece of “vital legislation” earlier in July, offered a near-surgical dissection of the MAGA leader’s recent deal with a U.S. tech giant in a letter to the Wall Street Journal—titled “Trump Takes a Wrong Turn on Nvidia’s Chips.”
Trump is suing the WSJ for a cool $10 billion, claiming the newspaper’s July article about a bizarre and sexually suggestive birthday card he’s alleged to have once sent convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
Moolenaar’s letter took a scalpel to the president’s decision last week to permit AI computer chip manufacturer Nvidia to sell advanced hardware to China, in exchange for the tech giant paying 15 percent tariffs to the White House on sales to the authoritarian Asian country.
The arrangement followed after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whom Trump has described as “my friend,” begged the MAGA leader to overturn a Commerce Department policy, implemented in April, that had otherwise restricted those exports, costing Nvidia an estimated $5.5 billion in the process.
Trump personally owns at least half a million dollars’ worth of Nvidia stock, the Washington Post reported this week.
Moolenaar described allowing U.S. companies to sell “export-controlled technologies to China, while paying the government a percentage of the sales,” as a worrying “departure from precedent” given such technologies are “controlled because of their potential to harm national security should they fall into nefarious hands.”
To win in the budding AI arms race, as well as triumph in “our broader rivalry with China,” the Michigan representative suggested it is imperative to “treat advanced chips as strategic assets, not ordinary trade goods.”
He went on to say “the president’s proposal also raises constitutional concerns,” given he is of the view “Congress, not the executive branch, has the authority to tax, raise revenue and appropriate funds,” adding that legislation Trump has himself signed into law, namely the 2018 Export Control Reform Act, “explicitly forbids charging fees for export licenses.”
“Taking a percentage of sales revenue in exchange for a license violates that—regardless of whether it is labelled ‘license condition’ or ‘revenue sharing,’” he concluded.
