The Dictatorship
SEC filings show some corporate leaders’ true feelings about Trump’s economy
To hear Jensen Huang tell it, President Donald Trump is a bold visionary leading America to triumph in business.
The CEO of major tech company Nvidia has been on a charm offensive recently, giving an interview praising Trump and downplaying concerns about tariffs to USA Today and sitting front row at a major artificial intelligence summit in Washington where the president signed executive orders aimed at boosting AI development.
“America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump,” Huang said. The comments were later posted by an official White House social media account keen to amplify a fresh testimonial on Trump’s leadership from a business executive now nearly as rich as Warren Buffett.
In SEC filings, Huang’s company is striking a very different tone.
But in corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Huang’s company struck a different tone.
A review of Nvidia’s latest quarterly filing with the SEC from April doesn’t sugarcoat the rugged business environment ahead for the $4 trillion company, the first publicly traded firm to reach that titanic market value thanks to the use of its computer chips to power all those AI programs.
Corporate leaders are just as guilty as our political ones when it comes to making bold statements they can’t quite back up. But the difference is that they are legally required to lay out an honest accounting of where things stand in SEC filings so that shareholders can make an informed decision.
In its filings, Nvidia’s immediate outlook is more volatile than Huang lets on. The filing mentions tariffs seven times and lists them under specific “risk factors” that could dent Nvidia’s revenue. The previous quarterly filing, from late 2024, only mentioned tariffs three times, and it didn’t single them out as an obstacle big enough to threaten the firm’s bottom line.
Other company filings show similarities. Ford CEO Jim Farley went on Fox News just as Trump was kicking off his global trade war in early April, saying the tariffs were an opportunity to “gain some business.” But its filings disclosed a $1.5 billion hit from the tariffs just over a month later. Harley Davidson, once a punching bag for Trump, disclosed to the government in May that the tariffs could cost it between $130 million and $175 million this year.
At one point earlier this year, Nvidia disclosed in another securities filing that it was taking a $5.5 billion hit due to new limits on H20 AI chip exports designed for the Chinese market. Those restrictions tipped Huang into action. He reportedly lobbied Trump to restart chip sales and argued the announcement strengthened Chinese competitors like Huawei. Huang got the result he wanted: The administration reversed course this month.
For a company like Nvidia looking to expand its footprint in Italy, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and beyond, Huang’s “first-buddy” diplomacy showcases the soft-touch maneuvering of chief executives desperate to avoid provoking Trump. Carlyle co-chair David Rubenstein said in April that Trump’s aggressiveness toward his critics was making business leaders afraid to speak out against his economic policies.
Instead, more of them are busy touting their “Made in America” credentials in earnings calls.
The business community is grappling with the reality that Trump isn’t anchored by small-government principles.
The business community is grappling with the reality that Trump isn’t anchored by small-government principles. He’s been zealous in broadening his personal power with little thought to institutional guardrails. In fact, Trump acknowledged he toyed with breaking up Nvidia, briefly channeling a Bernie Sanders-like appetite to curb monopolies.
“I figured we could go in and we could sort of break them up a little bit, get them a little competition, and I found out it’s not easy in that business,” the president said at the AI summit this week. He did commend Huang’s meteoric success. “What a job you’ve done,” Trump said.
There is at least one red line that major business executives don’t want Trump to cross. The Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday rode to the defense of the Federal Reserve, now up against an unprecedented scorched-earth campaign from Trump over its decision to hold steady on interest rates so far this year. “The independence of the Fed has a long tradition, that has served the country well for 250 years,” the Chamber said in a little-noticed statement. “There is no reason to change it now.”
Nvidia is just one prominent example of a firm pulled in different directions. The cutting-edge Silicon Valley company is plowing ahead with its vision of dominating the AI industry. But its success is also at the mercy of a president who treats tariffs as a 19th century tool of personal pique.
For Huang, the only way to square that circle may be to say one thing to Trump in public and another thing to investors — and hope no one notices the disconnect.
Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a reporter who has covered economic policy and politics for Semafor, Business Insider and Quartz, among other publications.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say their interim deal to end the war with Iran will deliver a financial windfall to American farmers.
But the Iranians deny it. And in the absence of more details, sanctions experts are flummoxed over exactly how billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets would make their way to the American heartland from the escrow accounts where they’ve been locked for years by U.S. sanctions.
A tentative agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, and allow Iran to start selling its oil freely again during a 60-day period when the two countries will continue negotiating key issues. The memorandum of understanding also promised to unfreeze Iranian assets.
Trump’s deal has come under fire for failing to address the reasons the president cited for going to war with Iran on Feb. 28, including curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile program and its support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Lashing back at critics Tuesday on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said U.S. farmers would get a payday: The U.S. Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.’’
Vance, who spoke about the proposal after high-level talks in Switzerland, and Trump say that any frozen funds and assets held outside of Iran will be used to buy U.S. crops.
But the Iranians deny that’s part of the deal. A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said any agricultural purchases would be based on “prices and quality,’’ not terms dictated by Washington.
“It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
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Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, rejected Vance’s contention that the U.S. and Qatar would dictate how Iran uses unfrozen funds. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
A U.S. official dismissed the contradiction, asserting that Iranian leaders were speaking to their domestic audience. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said Iran was unlikely to abandon its other trade partners on food.
Iran’s major suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Argentina, he said. Trump’s demand to buy from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors.”
Under previous sanctions, the U.S. has required that money foreign countries spend on imports from Iran — such as South Korean purchases of oil and Iraqi purchases of Iranian electricity — be locked in escrow accounts and typically released only if the Treasury approves and if the proceeds go toward “non-sanctionable’’ items such as food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals and petroleum products through Aug. 21. It did not mention any escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who coordinated efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Iran in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it’s unclear what the new U.S.-Iran agreement actually means for releasing restricted Iranian assets.
Could the U.S. require that the assets be used to buy American farm products?
“Well, we can try!’’ Nephew, who helped design Iran sanctions in the Obama and Biden administrations, said by email. “All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
Banks do not have to comply, he said. If they refuse, the U.S. could sanction them as well.
But it’s rare for the U.S. to conduct itself that way, he added, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
___
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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