Amid a cost-of-living crisis, with US midterms a month away, the president held a ceremony to celebrate our tech overlords – again

He stands accused of being out of touch, enriching himself and his family, building a lavish White House ballroom and, with elections looming, neglecting the hardships of the voters who brought him to power.

Time for Donald Trump to show he still has the common touch? Nope.

On Thursday, the US president went to a building he named after himself, dished out awards to the world’s richest person – his old frenemy Elon Musk – and other tech billionaires and even received an award that belonged to his late uncle.

Given Trump’s gold fetish, the event was naturally entitled the Golden Age of American Innovation summit, which will be news to the many agencies and academies suffering billions of dollars in cuts to scientific research on his watch.

“We have an extremely high-IQ audience for a change,” the president told about 300 invited guests at the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace in Washington, a compliment he never pays to the crowds who line up for hours to attend his campaign rallies.

Standing on a podium with a white backdrop and series of US flags, the president gave a perfunctory speech, sticking unusually close to his teleprompter. He made references to artificial super intelligence but steered clear of the datacentres these tech overlords are erecting all over the country and, in the process, achieving the unique feat of getting Democrats and Republicans to agree on how much they hate them.

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