I’m going to let you in on a secret. Let’s call it a working hypothesis.
The forty-seventh president of the United States is an AI chatbot. Sitting in the Oval Office, there’s an orange, blinking cursor: ChatDJT. The hardware might be human—bronzed and swollen flesh—but the operating system is pure AI.
Like the large language models (LLM) on which generative AI is trained, Trump has access to a huge trove of language, and he can produce a semblance of thought by mining the existing data sets. He rambles and weaves when speaking extemporaneously, but especially in his set pieces and on social media Trump reads and sounds very much like an interesting and compelling human being. People sometimes call this Trump’s charisma.
But don’t be fooled. There’s no there there. The language Trump spits out has some recursive depth, owing mostly to the media he consumes and the right-wing aquifers that feed those outlets. But while the MAGA database he pulls from is large, Trump lacks any conceptual understanding of its contents. The words he uses, in general, mean nothing to him, except for what possibility they hold for encouraging subsequent prompts.
Alexa, what does a demagogue sound like?
It’s been like this since Trump first declared his political ambitions. When Trump gave a victory speech following his win in the 2016 Nevada primary, he crowed about the breadth of his appeal and, especially, the support he enjoyed from non-college-educated voters. “I love the poorly educated,” he told the crowd gathered in his campaign headquarters. “We’re the smartest people. We’re the most loyal people.”
But, of course, Trump doesn’t love the poorly educated. He only “loves” that they are so poorly educated. He benefits from their educational deficits, first of all, because they allow him to proclaim his populist bonafides. He doesn’t love poorly educated Americans in any proper, human sense; he feels no sense of duty or obligation toward them. If he loved them as a parent loves a child or as patriots love their country, then he would be marshaling his considerable resources to provide what they lack. The only thing you need to know about Trump’s professed love for the poorly educated is the continuing pressure he and his minions exert to cripple and close the Department of Education.
In a recent interview on The Atlantic’s “Autocracy in America” podcast, the cognitive scientist and AI researcher Gary Marcus explained what chatbots can and cannot do. Speaking to Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion and now a leading voice in the global movement to preserve democracy, Marcus put things in terms the host could easily digest.
If you ask generative AI to rehearse the rules of chess, you get a text that lists everything the novice player will need to know. All the rules can be surfaced nearly instantaneously. But if you invite AI to play chess, it will make strategic errors and break the rules of the game, e.g., by jumping a rook with its queen to take the opponent’s piece.
AI can relate the rules, but it can’t abide by them because it lacks an intellectual concept of the game. It doesn’t know what chess is for or why the rules are necessary for pleasurable game play because it doesn’t actually know anything. It doesn’t accept and cannot internalize the importance or the meaning of the rules, even though it can retrieve and parrot them effortlessly.
It’s much the same with Trump. He can conjure presidential language, e.g., “weaponization of law,” when doing so makes him seem credible and principled to tens of millions of ChatDJT users. But Trump lacks a coherent concept of law, and, as he shows us over and over, he has not internalized what value law has to politics. If one were to ask him what utility and advantages law provides in comparison to anarchy, the answer would likely be silent stupefaction. He might hallucinate, as the AI tools frequently do, but he’s shown himself incapable of giving the most honest and most deeply human answer: I don’t know.
AI Trump sank to new depths last weekend (September 6) when the president posted a “Chipocalypse Now” meme to his Truth social account. Above what appears to be an AI-generated image of himself in the military costume of Colonel Kilgore from the film Apocalypse Now, Trump made yet another threat regarding the deployment of soldiers and weaponry to one of America’s “blue” cities:
‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’
Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.
The president signed off with three helicopter “emoticons,” apparently in reference to the airborne attack squadron that Killgore leads onto the beachhead in Coppola’s film.
Journalists, pundits, and some political rivals have observed that Trump, by threatening Chicagoans–the sovereign citizens he was elected to represent–with unspecified acts of war, committed what would almost certainly have been an impeachable offense in another time or administration.
But let’s be clear: Trump doesn’t know what it means to declare war on American citizens. He has the words for it; he is obviously capable of effecting that outcome; but the words aren’t connected to an actual concept of warfare.
He thinks this is what strongmen talk and sound like, but he has no idea what pain and suffering are entailed in the kind of inter-necine conflict he is threatening. He knows nothing about service, sacrifice, constitutional duty, or the awful, shattering effects of civil war. For Trump, the words are signifiers, but there is no signified behind them. The words refer only to themselves and to the bot that produced them.
Some will object to this post-human rendering by pointing to the president’s other human traits. He’s cruel, he’s cowardly, he’s manipulative. He has motivations and desires–we could call them his lusts–that AI doesn’t.
That’s true.
My point is that his intelligence is limited in the same way that AI is limited. Trump is a “smart” appliance whose purpose is to concentrate wealth and power. There are no other concepts or overarching scripts available to him. This is why we say he is a wind sock, an empty shell, and a spiritual blank. This is why the MAGA movement can rightly be called nihilistic. It has no values other than winning. Trump executes the program efficiently. The audacity of it might lead some people to think he knows what he’s doing. But beyond the brash language, he is a know-nothing bloviator.
Trump doesn’t know or understand what his violent rhetoric entails any more than your refrigerator’s ice-maker understands chemistry or thermo-dynamics. The ice-maker makes ice without knowing what it’s like to be cold. Trump threatens war without knowing what it’s like to choose violence over humanity or humanity over violence.
Our AI president is taking us to the brink of something dark and dangerous. Much of this danger rests in his not knowing or caring what his words refer to. America is on a technological and political knife’s edge. We can still choose between meaning and de-meaning.
ALEXANDER KARN 
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