> Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party. If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk.

Please play the canned laughter. Probably one of the best comedy lines Dario has written.

But I guess he has no choice but acting like this. He has to make it sound like the US companies have so much leading gap that they can slow down as a hare waiting for the tortoise. Otherwise it's going to hurt both Trump's ego and their IPO price.