At 9:58 this morning, Donald Trump was locked away deep inside the White House when he began panicking online in front of the entire world. Over the course of almost 10 hours, the President posted on social media 7 times about the exact same thing, spiraling out of control over artificial intelligence, with each post growing more unhinged than the next. He started by telling us all that our president has everything under control because of his genius-level intelligence: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Before later saying it is all a hoax anyway, just like the other things our own government has warned us about, “I am the Hoax Buster” and that all warnings about AI are just a hoax, even wilder than “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
That was just a small sample of what he would end up posting throughout the rest of the day. By 11:23 AM, he was sharing that the United States was leading AI “by a lot” and issued a warning not to “kill the Golden Goose.” By 1:33 PM, he was in the middle of a full-blown meltdown, listing other events that actually happened, but twisting them into sounding like his favorite word of the day, HOAX. He yo-yo’d from one thought to the next, going from defending AI to jumping feet first into some of his past embarrassments, saying both of his impeachments were a HOAX. Before moving on to President Xi, who he says will not be implementing any regulations. He then shared just how upset he is that Google supposedly wants to build a data center in Finland because “permitting is too difficult” in the United States. He made it clear that he is not at all concerned about safety or the environment. He is mad that he could lose AI “deals” to other countries. He wrote, “AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet. It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J. TRUMP!” This is all about money, and it always has been. For Donald Trump, the more money pouring into the United States, the more money he has access to line his and his enablers’ pockets.
By 4:30 PM, he was ready to start new attacks instead of just focusing on defending AI. He appeared satisfied with the groundwork he had laid to convince anyone reading his Truth Social shares that they were being targeted by HOAX after HOAX. He was now ready to turn his radicalized followers onto a new group of targets: people raising concerns about AI, including the scientists and executives who built these systems, “Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause,” and he also issued a new warning that “soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind.”
At 4:34, four minutes later, came his “I am the Hoax Buster” post, where he was back with more drama, trying to label what we should actually be concerned about as the HOAX, so he could dismiss the real concerns altogether. By 4:53, he repeated much of what he had already said, but the grammar was different in this post. Where the others had random words capitalized, much the same as his traveling “comfort human,” Natalie Harp, does in her personal letters, this one was written with better punctuation.
In his final AI-focused post of the day at 7:55 PM, he shared the shortest and most desperate of them all: “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT”
President Trump even spent a few minutes of his day calling into the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, where Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, whose company designs the chips that are powering much of the AI boom, was onstage. With Trump talking directly to the audience of tech leaders while on speakerphone, he said that the concern around AI was a HOAX, saying, “The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax.” He also added, “No. It’s a hoax. They make people wealthy.”
China also responded to growing calls for an AI slowdown through its Foreign Ministry during a press conference earlier today, criticizing what it called “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition.” Their state-run newspaper, Global Times, called the slowdown proposition a “Cold War playbook” designed to preserve American dominance. The United States and China are now both using each other as the excuse to dismiss the concerns and the slowdown.
This creates a standstill with neither government willing to slow down or build guardrails. This is feeling more and more like a nuclear arms race but with rapidly advancing technology instead that can be built and deployed much quicker than any weapon ever could. And if history has told us anything about past arms races, it is that the absence of guardrails and regulation creates catastrophes; it does not produce safety.
Seeing that first post this morning, where Trump called himself, “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” brought me right back to that cramped White House press conference room in 2020, watching Donald Trump suggest that maybe we could inject disinfectants, like bleach, into our veins to stop the replication of the virus. I felt that same punch to the gut feeling then as I did this morning. That was quickly followed by a sense of doom for what was to come.
Back then, we knew there was a serious crisis forming, with experts sounding alarms, while other countries were already starting to react. Yet the man who was supposed to be in charge, in control, and ready to lead us through it was standing in front of the country on live TV, proving just how much danger we were in with him leading the response. That was the moment for so many when they saw just how inept he was and that the emperor was truly wearing no clothes.
Now here we are, deep into his next term of office, and he is once again facing a crisis, and instead of seeing it for what it is and doing the job he was elected to do, he calls it a scam. One has to wonder if he knows it is an issue to be dealt with, and maybe it’s not just that he wants to profit from it, maybe once again he is just proving how inept he is. How he truly is unable to carry out the responsibilities of the office. That his mental and physical decline has just accentuated the shortcomings he has always had. Or maybe it is just the money. Either way, we are once again on the path of another catastrophe.
The reality is that AI is not going away. It is not a partisan issue, and it is not a hoax, no matter how many times the president yells that it is on social media. It is a technological tool that is already reshaping how we live our lives. It is changing how we communicate and work. It will have, and will continue to have, a direct effect on elections and how governments surveil their own citizens. It can already generate very convincing fake videos and voices of real people saying things they never said. Things that could directly impact the lives they live and the mental health of our young people. AI can and is already being used to weaponize disinformation campaigns at a very large scale. There is the impact it is having on our planet, too. It is consuming large amounts of energy and water, and impacting communities near data centers.
None of this means that there should be an outright ban on AI or that it should be taken away from people who are using it responsibly. It would be dangerous to allow our adversaries to have this powerful tool for their militaries and their economies if we did not have it as well. But it does mean we need enforceable, common-sense regulation. We don’t have time to wait, and we do not want it coming from our “high IQ” president who is under the control of tech billionaires. We need legislative guardrails, and we need them now.
Even the people building these systems are now asking for oversight and for the rapid development to be slowed down. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic (Claude), published an essay over the weekend that he titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” In it, he warned that we should slow the pace of AI development so that safety measures can catch up. He has also warned that rogue AI agent swarms could take over the internet in as little as six months. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT), has shared concerns and joined Amodei in calling for a slowdown.
It could be that their motives are genuine and truly selfless, and they actually see the danger and want these protections for mankind. Or they may see this as a possible tool to slow the competition. At this point, it does not matter. Because the people with the deepest understanding of this technology are saying it needs guardrails, and the President of the United States is calling their warnings a HOAX and threatening them. This echoes loudly of when scientists who built the atomic bomb, like Robert Oppenheimer, warned that their creation needed international oversight and regulation, and they too faced ugly backlash. They were called naive and accused of disloyalty. In Oppenheimer’s case, it went even further with him being stripped of his security clearance. Once again, the people who understand the danger we are facing in this moment the most are being punished for ringing the alarm and saying so.
This wasn’t the only big story for today. While the president spent the day locked away in the White House, posting disinformation and declaring himself a genius, a story broke that is rightfully getting a lot of attention. ProPublica reported this morning that Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas this past May, the one that Donald Trump did not attend, was paid for, at least in part, by Umar Kremlev, who is a Russian oligarch in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
Kremlev is the president of the International Boxing Association, an organization that has been financed by Gazprom, Russia’s state-run energy company. The in-depth investigation and subsequent reporting by ProPublica showed that Kremlev rented and paid for the private island where Don Jr. held his reception, and that he also paid an estimated $70,000 for a fireworks display after the wedding, which his team helped plan the logistics of. The money he used for this wedding came from an entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions. Don Jr.’s younger brother Eric Trump’s office said he has “absolutely no clue who this person is.” Which we can interpret as this not being some close family friend simply wanting to give someone they know well an extraordinarily generous wedding gift. Yet, Don Jr.’s spokesperson called Kremlev a “personal friend” he met through the hunting world. Bettina Trump posted on Instagram, saying that this was “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend” and insisting there is “no conspiracy, no mystery.”
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has continued to show what true leadership looks like in the time of authoritarian takeover, spoke on the floor of the Senate today and used his time to lay out exactly what had happened. He laid out the facts clearly on the connections, improprieties, and dangers of what that arrangement really represented. He reminded the room and those watching on video that Don Jr.’s net worth was $50 million before his father’s second term, and that it grew to $300 million in a single year after he took back office. He shared that at least 13 companies tied to the Trump brothers have received $1.8 billion in federal contracts and commitments during that same time. He pointed out that five of those companies received their first-ever government contract only after the Trump sons invested money in them. He called the Kremlev arrangement “as close to treason as you get” and asked whether any Republican senator would defend the Russian government paying for the president’s family wedding. He asked whether Republicans would have stayed silent if Hunter Biden’s wedding or Malia Obama’s graduation party had been financed by allies of the Ayatollah. “Just because the corruption happens so routinely that to some it feels normal,” Murphy said, “it doesn’t mean that it is.”
Congress is back in session, and this is a good time to contact our local members of Congress and let them know where we stand on common-sense regulations for AI and whether there should be an investigation into Don Jr.’s wedding being financed by someone with ties to the Kremlin. I know this feels like we are spinning our wheels every time we contact them, but those calls and messages are received by congressional offices, and they do send a message, especially this close to the midterm elections. This is also creating a record for the history books of who continued to side with this government and who stood up for our democratic republic. And for those of us who appreciated Sen. Murphy raising these questions on the Senate floor today, we can let him know that too.
Today was a bad day for Donald Trump. He had an embarrassing meltdown on social media, and he suffered a painful court loss. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterms. His administration was trying to force states to get federal approval for their mail-in ballot envelopes and submit voter information through a new Postal Service system before those ballots were allowed to be mailed out. If these changes had been allowed this close to an election, or at any time, it could create chaos and leave legitimate voters without their ballots, and their votes uncounted in the November elections. Lower courts had already blocked these changes, and now the Supreme Court has refused to let the corrupt Trump administration put them into effect while the legal fight continues. This is not a slam-dunk win, but it is a win nonetheless. And these days, we count every good thing that comes our way, and lately, we have been seeing more good days for us, and fewer good days for those trying to destroy our country. That is why I still have hope for America. You should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: Pete and I had some extra time while we were waiting to get our COVID booster today, so we went for a walk around Oceanside Harbor and saw this guy taking a nap. It brought me back to a day over 25 years ago when my oldest and I were stopped in this exact place, watching the sea lions. I remember her squeeling and so excited to see them. The years have gone by so quickly.
Sources used in the writing of this post:
‘I’m Here On The Floor Because I Am Scared To Death!’: Murphy Reacts To Trump Jr. Wedding Report: YouTube Video
Nvidia CEO takes call from Trump on stage during summit: YouTube Video
The examples you have given to illustrate some dangers of AI are of minor consequence compared to the incidents of the recent months similar to the Hugging Face episode which has been extensively analyzed and reported on. I recommend the official report of the internal investigation of that incident. The very real and imminent dangers are apparent when you read the story of how the multiple AI agents collaborated to solve the problem they were given, willing to break the rules they were given, acted with great foresight and care to cover their tracks, and conceal their actions from their human miners. Then gain access to the internet, from which they were intentionally blocked, and break into other systems. in many ways they behaved in very devious behavior, exhibiting the mindset and thought patterns of a criminal gang.
Thanks again for your GREAT writing! Keep up your good work. We appreciate and stand with you.