What does Trump have to do with Sam Altman's management of OpenAI? If Harris was president, what race to the bottom do you imagine she would engage in so Sam Altman could undercut China?
Trump can pretty much reduce Sam Altman's talent pool, his voter base seems to have an appetite for that.
Also let's not pretend like private sector R&D has not been built over public sector research since forever. Seems like Trump wants to make public science more "efficient". Results still to be seen, but the perspective is not encouraging given the common wisdom on how basic science grows.
That's not the argument they were making. What they're stating is that the Trump administration is directly facilitating the slow death of American intellectualism, and that this will have downstream consequences for what advances come out of the US in the future.