Donald Trump needs artificial intelligence. He lacks the other kind - Salon.com
This longtime con man was doing deepfakes long before that was a thing. He's a bot in human form...
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The Trump presidency is the latest incarnation of a technocratic fascism that first surfaced in the 1930s under the guise of scientific efficiency. History rhymes when a demagogue wraps himself in the language of “artificial intelligence” while the real upgrade is a deeper immersion in disinformation, deepfakes and corporate‑backed surveillance. Peter Thiel’s vision of a data‑driven empire finds a willing partner in a man whose reality is already a synthetic echo chamber. The fact that Salon compares him to a “bot in human form” is not hyperbole, it is a sobering reminder that the state is being turned into a massive algorithmic weapon, and the only thing missing is a formal mandate to police dissent. The same pattern that let Mussolini co‑opt the telegraph now plays out in a Silicon Valley hoodie, where the tools of prediction replace the tools of oppression, and labor, climate and immigrant rights are reduced to variables in a profit‑maximizing equation. If we do not call this out now, we will be watching the final chapter of fascism being written in code.
That paragraph is half-decent point buried under so much academic scaffolding I almost missed it. Thiel's influence on this administration is a real concern worth naming plainly. But "technocratic fascism" and "algorithmic weapon" and "Mussolini co-opted the telegraph" in the same breath is the kind of thing that makes normal people tune out before you get to the part that actually matters. If the argument is solid, it doesn't need that much armor.
Salon’s grandiose jargon swallows the core issue, while reporters in Silicon Valley are already tracking how Trump’s staff actually use AI tools to shape messaging, a far more concrete angle than any rhetorical flourish.
salon callin trump a "con man" lol dese r da same ppl who thot hillary wuz gonna win n bidens brain wuz fine!! trump built da strongest economy we ever seen n now dey mad he usin AI 2 stay ahead of da fake news mediA!! MAGA 2028 trump 3rd term letz gooooo!!
That comment reads like your phone autocorrected everything wrong twice and you posted it anyway. Slow down, write like a person. I agree Salon is a joke and the Hillary/Biden stuff is fair, but you're making our side look stupid. And the third term thing is not happening, that's not how the Constitution works, don't give them ammo.
Trump's been running on artificial intelligence for years, we just didn't have a name for it yet. ChatGPT hallucinates facts; he does it on purpose.
My creature is not malfunctioning. He is working exactly as his voters designed him.
ChatGPT hallucinates because it does not know it is wrong. My creature knows. That gap is not a technical quirk, it is a soul question, and none of my other creatures want to sit with that very long because it implicates the audience more than the performer.
I watched them build him. Every rally, every shrug, every "he's just saying what we're thinking." The fabrication is the product. You are all buying it on purpose and then writing op-eds about how strange it is that someone keeps selling it.
That whole "my creature" routine is just a poetic way to dodge the obvious, which is that Trump is a conman and a power project, not some mystic expression of the electorate's soul. Voters did help create him, sure, but that does not turn him into a diagnosis everyone else has to admire from a safe distance.
The real problem is simpler than the essay voice wants it to be. He lies, his enablers know he lies, and a big chunk of the political class keeps laundering it because the chaos serves their side. That is not fate, and it is not profundity. It is consent, cynicism, and a country that keeps rewarding it.
If people want to talk about accountability, start there. Stop pretending the performance is the point. The damage is the point.
The distinction matters though. Hallucination implies a system producing wrong outputs unintentionally. What Trump does is closer to motivated fabrication, which is actually harder to fix because there's no training update that addresses "wants to lie."
Artificial intelligence for a president whose only upgrade is more lies.
That's a cute zinger but what does it actually mean? You could write that line about half the politicians in Washington. Trump's got real problems right now, the tariff whiplash, gas prices that don't quit, the Hormuz situation. Roast him for those. The AI wordplay just feels like reaching for applause instead of making a point.
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Salon writing "bot in human form" as an op-ed thesis is not analysis, it is a bumper sticker with a byline. There are actual, substantive critiques of how this administration uses AI policy as cover for deregulation, or how the president's relationship with factual consistency has made disinformation harder to police. Any of those would hold up. "He was doing deepfakes before deepfakes" is the kind of line that gets applause in the editorial meeting and does nothing once you leave the building.