Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Graphic Truth: Is Donald Trump signing more executive orders than normal?
He has issued 66 executive orders so far, more than double the number of executive orders Joe Biden signed in the first month of his presidency, and more than five times the number Trump signed during the first 30 days of his last term in 2016.
While executive orders are effective for hitting the ground running and fulfilling those infamous “first 100 days” campaign promises, critics point out that they are easily overturned, as seen on Trump’s first day in office, when he issued 26 executive orders, but also overturned 78 of Biden’s.
Some also argue that they are a sign of weakness – a cop-out used instead of passing lasting legislation through a perpetually gridlocked Congress. The deluge of legal challenges in response to Trump’s executive orders also shows how they can be stalled, or smacked down, by judges.
World leaders give Valentine's advice
Need Valentine's Day tips? Don’t ask these world leaders. Trust us. #PUPPETREGIME
Watch more of GZERO's award-winning PUPPET REGIME series!
Biden signs with a talent agency
The ex-president has reached a deal with CAA, one of Hollywood's most storied agencies.
What projects can we expect from the Kid from Scranton? #PUPPETREGIME
Is the TikTok threat really about AI?
Four years after President Donald Trump’s initial unsuccessful attempt to ban TikTok on national security grounds, Congress succeeded in passing bipartisan legislation to force the app's removal, which former President Joe Bidensigned into law. The ban, requiring mobile app stores, cloud hosts, and internet service providers to drop TikTok, was upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday despite challenges from TikTok, content creators, and free speech advocates who argued it violated the First Amendment.
Yet TikTok’s presence in America continues through an unusual turn of events. After briefly going offline in the US late Saturday, the app resumed service on Sunday ahead of President Trump’s inauguration on Monday, with the new president issuing an executive order late Monday to keep TikTok operational for another 75 days. This executive intervention, however bizarre since Trump initiated the effort to ban TikTok during his first term, also raises complex legal questions about presidential authority to override — or ignore — congressional legislation.
Throughout this political saga, a fundamental question remains: What exactly is TikTok’s threat to national security? Critics typically focus on two main concerns: China’s potential access to American user data and its ability to influence public opinion through the app’s content algorithm.
While TikTok stands as one of the world’s most sophisticated implementations of artificial intelligence in social media, its role in the broader US-China AI competition is nuanced. The platform’s AI capabilities, though powerful, operate largely parallel to rather than directly within the ongoing technological rivalry between the two nations, which is more focused on large language models, generative AI, and the advanced chips that power these systems.
“TikTok is AI, but not the kind that is fueling today’s global AI race,” explained Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “Its recommendation engine is more akin to reinforcement learning, the AI technique behind AlphaGo, the DeepMind system that mastered the board game Go by training against itself. Unlike generative AI models like ChatGPT, TikTok's AI isn’t about creating – it’s about optimizing engagement and influence.”
This distinction is important. While attention has focused on TikTok’s data collection practices, experts suggest the more significant concern lies elsewhere. After all, TikTok collects about as much data from users as any other social media app.
Kenton Thibaut, senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said that data collection would become a bigger issue if the US were to enter formal conflict with China. “Should the US end up in a conflict with China, it is the device-level compromises that the app represents” — such as collecting real-time location data — “that, in my opinion, pose a much greater potential threat than the data-gathering or algorithmic manipulation concerns that are currently at the fore of the conversation surrounding the app,” she said.
But TikTok’s algorithm is more relevant to the AI race than the data it collects, according to Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo-technology at Eurasia Group. “That’s why China indicated that ByteDance can’t sell TikTok’s AI recommendation algorithm without government approval last time around, and is very likely still holding that view,” she said.
The potential value of this algorithm hasn’t gone unnoticed by the private sector. Perplexity AI’s recent bid to merge with TikTok’s US operations, reportedly valued at “well north of $50 billion,” suggests that TikTok’s recommendation system might be valuable for advancing the capabilities of an AI search engine like Perplexity.
However, Anton Dahbura, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, offers a more skeptical view: “I have no reason to doubt that TikTok’s algorithm is very good, but given the state of many software technologies today, it isn’t irreproducible,” he said. “However, controlling the flow of information on such a scale and for nefarious purposes by any company should be recognized as unethical, irresponsible, and hopefully someday, illegal.”
The real concern, according to Dai, extends beyond mere technology: “The bigger story isn’t TikTok’s data or even ByteDance's dominance — it’s Xi Jinping’s global ambitions. TikTok gives China an unprecedented ability to shape what Americans see, think, believe, and even dream.”
With TikTok poised to survive in the United States under President Trump’s conditional approval, pending a potential partial sale, the platform represents an unprecedented scenario in American media: Never before has such an influential platform, powered by sophisticated AI and used by millions of Americans, remained under the potential influence of an adversarial nation. But politics makes the strangest bedfellows: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chewattended Trump’s inauguration on Monday, an assurance that Trump will rewrite the typical bounds of the US-China relationship, perhaps even softening his stance on China if he feels like it serves him well.Washington, DC, USA; President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, outgoing United States President Joe Biden and first lady Dr. Jill Biden participate in the departure ceremony for the Bidens on the East Front of the United States Capitol in Washington, DC after the swearing-in of Donald Trump as President on January 20, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Biden’s preemptive pardons, Trumpcoin, Billionaires blow up, India convicts hospital rapist
5: With just minutes left in his term, President Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to five members of his family, explaining that he feared people associated with him could be prosecuted under the Trump administration. Hours earlier, he pardoned Gen. Mark Milley and Dr. Anthony Fauci, as well as the members and staff of the Congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and police officers who testified before that committee. Biden also commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier, an Indigenous activist who was controversially convicted of killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975.
5.5 billion: A cryptocurrency token launched by President Donald Trump, known as $Trump, reached a value of nearly $5.5 billion within hours of its launch on Saturday. A Delaware company called CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC owns 80% of the coins, but it is unclear how much money Trump will make from this launch.
3: Oxfam, the UK-based anti-poverty charity, reported that the wealth of billionaires grew three times as fast in 2024 than in 2023, accelerating wealth inequality while the global rate of poverty has barely changed. The report comes as the World Economic Forum, the marquee gathering of the world’s political and financial bigwigs, gets underway in Davos, Switzerland.
1: A court in India has convicted one person, Sanjay Roy, of the brutal rape of a trainee doctor in Kolkata last year that launched nationwide protests — but the parents of the victim maintain that the crime was committed by a group, not a single man. Despite Indian police claiming before the court that the rape was “rarest of rare” incidents, the most recent data available in India shows 31,516 reports of rape in 2022, a fraction of the true number of assaults as many are not reported.
How Biden’s presidency will be remembered
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from Washington, DC.
This is what we're watching in US Politics this week: One question that's going to be debated for a long time in the coming years is what is President Biden's legacy? I think there are a couple of things that he's going to be remembered for.
The first is the extraordinarily chaotic global environment over which he presided. Republicans will tie this back to the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan that President Biden presided over. But following that, you had the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the events of October 7th in the Middle East that led to the ongoing war there that is just now starting to look like it's settling down. But this is clearly going to be one of the background themes of any assessments of President Biden's legacy.
Biden's now one of four one-term presidents in the last 50 years, and one of the reasons that he lost was of course inflation. And inflation, you could argue was fueled by the pandemic or you could argue it was fueled by early actions taken by the Biden administration to spend a lot of money, perhaps more money than was necessary. But either way, the inflationary story of 2021 and 2022 is going to be remembered as one of his key legacies and one of the reasons that he lost reelection. Now that loss to Donald Trump, allowing probably one of the more controversial presidents in certainly recent American history, to come back into office and mount an unprecedented political comeback is also going to be part of Biden's legacy. Because of the fact that he decided that he was able to run even at his advanced age, that blocked out the Democrats from having an opportunity to hold a primary and then forced the Democrats to change horses midstream and move over to Kamala Harris in the middle of the election cycle, who of course lost to Trump. That is also going to be part of his legacy.
And it's unclear. Biden thinks, says it publicly, he could have won election if he just stayed in. He's 82 years old. He'd be the oldest president ever if he did, and there's obvious decline in his faculties over the course of the year. But more importantly, the American people really started to lose confidence in Biden as time went on this year. So not at all clear that he would've won that election or that any other Democrat could have won that election if there were a primary process. But his sticking around and the White House staff and other Democratic operatives that covered for the age-related decline that he was experiencing is also going to be a part of President Biden's election.
Probably one of the more consequential things I think he's going to end up having done over the longer term is increasing the US confrontation with China, particularly over technology policy. The world is at a critical juncture when it comes to the advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence. And the wall that the Biden administration has been trying to erect around Chinese access to US advanced technologies is going to have ripple effects and repercussions for years to come. The Trump administration's likely to continue a lot of that, and this could potentially be an inflection point in 10 years time as we look back and look at the two different tech ecosystems that are being built out. A lot of that legacy is going to trace back to the Biden administration.
So that's a pretty complex, mixed legacy. The US doesn't have lot of one-term presidents in recent history. Most one-term presidents aren't remembered that fondly. Presidents like George H.W. Bush look a lot better in the long distance of history, whereas President Jimmy Carter who recently passed away still has a bit of a mixed legacy. And that's probably where Biden's going to end up.
- Biden sings his swan song at UNGA, urges support for Ukraine ›
- Will a lame-duck Biden be bold before Trump takes over? ›
- Gaza ceasefire likely as Biden and Trump both push ›
- Ian Bremmer on debate: A big loss for Biden ›
- Who will Trump’s team be? ›
- Trump’s Cabinet picks set up likely battle with GOP Senate ›
- Trump picks Trudeau critics for Cabinet ›
- What Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks mean for AI ›
- How a second Trump term could reshape global politics ›
President Joe Biden delivers a speech at the State Department on Jan. 13, 2025.
Biden wants AI development on federal land
Biden did express concern about the environmental impact of data centers, which consume loads of electricity to power them – and water to cool them down. “We will not let America be out-built when it comes to the technology that will define the future, nor should we sacrifice critical environmental standards and our shared efforts to protect clean air and clean water,” the president wrote in a statement.
The executive order also clears the way for the federal land to be leased to developers of “clean energy” as well, with Biden framing them as key to the expansion of AI capability in the country.
The OpenAi logo is displayed on a mobile screen in this photo illustration.
OpenAI offers its vision to Washington
The 15-page document lays out OpenAI’s vision for how America can maintain its global lead in AI development while staying ahead of China. OpenAI proposes national investment in AI infrastructure, such as new data centers, chip manufacturing facilities, and power plants. It also suggests “AI economic zones” — regions with streamlined permitting processes for AI.
OpenAI is also kicking off its “Innovating for America” campaign, a national tour in which company representatives will push for infrastructure investments — with visits to Washington, DC, as well as Alabama, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New York.
OpenAI has already started getting closer to the Trump administration with co-founder and CEO Sam Altman donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, something many tech companies and CEOs have done. Now it’s making specific demands of Trump’s Washington, which OpenAI hopes could clear red tape and boost AI investment.