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Trump Retardation Syndrome

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Tuesday, Aug 12, 2025 - 8:16
Trump holding up an Nvidia H20 chip while pundits angrily post on their phones.

Tuesday Evening Trading Update

Trump Retardation Syndrome

We’ve all heard of Trump Derangement Syndrome—the reflexive tendency among some of the President’s critics to view every move he makes as catastrophic. But the latest uproar over Nvidia’s H20 chip sales to China reveals a related malady: Trump Retardation Syndrome—when opposition to Trump is so knee-jerk that it overrides basic subject-matter understanding.

Over the past few days, a number of left-of-center commentators have slammed Trump for supposedly putting U.S. national security at risk by letting Nvidia and AMD sell AI chips to China, in exchange for the companies paying 15% of those sales to the U.S. government. They’re framing this as Trump “selling out” national security for a cut of the profits. 

One example is this post by author James Surowiecki: 

Another is this post by a Georgetown professor:

Here’s the problem with that narrative: the Nvidia H20 is a deliberately downgraded chip, specifically designed to be exportable to China under U.S. export controls. The Biden administration’s restrictions on AI chip exports to China set performance thresholds; the H20 was engineered to come in just under them. These are not top-tier A100 or H100 chips. They’re the semiconductor equivalent of selling a 737 MAX to China—not an F-35 fighter jet.

This was well understood by anyone who has followed the AI export control story over the past two years. But Trump’s loudest critics in this case seem either unaware of it or unwilling to acknowledge it, because doing so would make their preferred “Trump endangers America for cash” narrative fall apart.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room to debate the merits of the arrangement. One could argue that even selling downgraded AI chips to China gives them marginal gains they might later exploit. But that’s a different argument from claiming Trump just handed Beijing cutting-edge U.S. tech in exchange for a “kickback.” The actual policy question here is whether a controlled, degraded export with a U.S. revenue share is better or worse than a total ban—which might just accelerate China’s domestic chip development.

The bottom line: if you don’t know the difference between an H100 and an H20, or why the latter exists, you shouldn’t be lecturing anyone about the national security implications of selling it. But that’s what Trump Retardation Syndrome does—it replaces informed analysis with reflexive outrage.

Nvidia Or Advanced Money Destroyer? 

Coincidentally, one of those two chipmakers was our system's #1 name last night. As regular readers know, since December of 2022, PA’s top names have averaged returns of 16.25% over the next six months, versus SPY 0.66%↑’s average of 9.16%. Today, we have bullish options trades teed up on our #1 name (the chipmaker) and our #3 name (a nuclear stock) from last night. If you would like a heads up when we place those trades, feel free to subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list below. 


 

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