Americans are grappling with how to deal with the rapid development of AI.

President Trump is the one who will ultimately decide the nation’s course of action.

Now Trump faces an AI demand that forces this terrible choice.

Manchin’s Demand From the CNBC Couch

Former Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) called on President Donald Trump during an appearance on CNBC’s *Squawk Box* to use executive authority to pause new artificial intelligence IPOs until Congress passes legislation establishing safeguards for the rapidly developing technology.

Manchin framed the request as an urgent step to prevent companies developing advanced AI from facing additional pressure to race ahead before lawmakers establish rules governing the technology.

And then he went full apocalyptic.

“The president of the United States has the power to save humanity,” Manchin said. “They must be concerned about this thing can take off and think on its own and make its own decisions and override anything of humans and we can’t stop it. If that’s what they’re concerned about, then stop it now when you can.”

That is a sitting former United States senator calling on a sitting president to freeze capital markets by executive order because he’s scared of the robots.

Take a breath and read that again.

Why This Should Alarm Conservatives More Than AI Does

The proposal itself is worth examining for a minute, because what Manchin actually wants is breathtaking in its scope. He wants President Trump to use executive power to shut down AI companies’ ability to raise money in the public markets. Not regulate them. Not require disclosure. Freeze IPOs. Deny companies access to capital. Do it by executive order, bypassing Congress entirely.

This is top-down government intervention in the private economy on a scale that would make most Democrats blush. And it’s coming from a man who spent much of his Senate career presenting himself as a centrist deal-maker.

Manchin’s track record on that “centrist” label deserves scrutiny. He voted for every major Biden spending package that got through the Senate. He was a reliable Democrat vote when his party needed him. Now he shows up on CNBC calling for the federal government to decide which tech companies get to go public and which ones don’t. That’s not moderation. That’s command-and-control economics with a folksy West Virginia accent.

Government doesn’t create wealth. It redistributes it. And every time a politician decides Washington should pick winners and losers in a capital market, the losers are working Americans whose retirement accounts, pension funds, and savings depend on those markets functioning freely.

An IPO freeze on AI companies wouldn’t slow artificial intelligence. It would just guarantee that the development of that technology happens in places with fewer restrictions — including inside countries like Communist China, which faces no such barriers and would be thrilled to watch America voluntarily hamstring its own tech sector.

The Pushback Manchin Deserved

Republican National Committee member and Human First chairwoman Amy Kremer, who had previously called for AI safeguards while opposing a broad moratorium, pushed back on Manchin’s specific proposal, saying an IPO freeze would interfere with capital markets without addressing the underlying safety concerns.

“I do not support a president using executive authority to interfere with the markets,” Kremer said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “An IPO freeze is the kind of top-down mandate that conservatives have long opposed, and it would not even address the actual risk.”

Kremer didn’t stop there.

“What the president should use his executive power for is to demand pre-deployment testing begin immediately. That is where the real safeguards belong, not in blocking companies from raising capital,” she continued.

Kremer is right. There’s a serious conversation to be had about what AI can and can’t do, what safeguards make sense, and how the federal government should think about an industry that is moving faster than any regulatory framework can track. That conversation deserves serious people making serious arguments grounded in actual policy.

Manchin’s argument isn’t that. His argument is that the president should wave an executive wand and freeze a sector of the economy because he’s worried about what might happen if machines get too smart. That’s not policy. It’s panic dressed up as leadership.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment to somewhere between 10 and 20 percent within the next few years. That warning deserves real engagement. But the answer to legitimate concerns about AI’s displacement of workers and concentration of power in Big Tech’s hands is not to hand those same concerns over to the federal government and ask Washington to decide who gets to raise money and who doesn’t.

The same Big Tech companies that would benefit from a freeze on competitor IPOs are the ones that spent years censoring conservatives on COVID policy, questions about the 2020 election, and discussions of January 6. Giving Washington the authority to control who enters the AI market doesn’t protect Americans from Big Tech. It cements the advantages of whoever is already big enough to survive the freeze.

What This Moment Actually Tells You

Joe Manchin is no longer a senator. He left office and spent time floating the idea of a third-party presidential run before deciding against it. Now he resurfaces on CNBC with a proposal that manages to combine the worst instincts of the regulatory Left with the kind of executive overreach that conservatives spent the last decade arguing against when Democrats wanted to use it.

There’s something worth noting about the political company this idea keeps. Calls for pausing AI development, freezing AI investment, and demanding government oversight of the technology are coming from a bipartisan coalition of people who agree on very little else. That might sound reassuring. It shouldn’t.

When Democrats who backed every COVID mandate and every lockdown suddenly discover they’re worried about government overreach in AI — except when the overreach is the kind they’re proposing — that’s not a genuine philosophical position. It’s a lane they’re trying to occupy because it sounds reasonable.

And when a former Democrat senator who was a reliable vote for trillion-dollar spending bills shows up demanding that a Republican president freeze capital markets by executive order, the correct response is not to applaud his bipartisanship. It’s to ask why he thinks using presidential power to override the free market is suddenly a good idea now that a Republican is in the White House.

The AI question is real. The risks from systems that outpace human oversight deserve serious attention. But the answer to that challenge starts with Congress doing its job, not with asking a president to shut down IPOs and call it saving humanity.

Manchin said the president has the power to save humanity. What he’s describing would actually be the power to save Washington’s control over who gets to compete in the most consequential technology market in a generation.

Those are not the same thing.

Source: Fox News Digital, “Joe Manchin calls on Trump to freeze AI IPOs, claims president has ‘power to save humanity'”