Opinion

I’ve heard enough this past week about AI – or as Linda McMahon calls it, A1 — taking over the world and annihilating all human beings that it’s frankly left me kind of worried. I mean, how pathetic would it be if we were able to conquer fear, hate and disease, but we fell prey to software programs?

Pretty disappointing. And Trump's promise that the only guardrail AI needs is a "strong and smart (high IQ!) president" doesn't do much to allay fears.

I keep thinking about that haunting photograph of Donald Trump, framed in the window of his gilded new Air Force One, looking at poster boards prepared for him by the foolhardy lackey Bill Pulte and apparently unaware that he could be seen.

It's an unforgettable image because it captured something I can't stop noticing: every day now feels like looking through that window and watching something get demolished. Trump has unleashed total destruction on this country, and it's gotten to a point where it's too much to comprehend.

Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” Last week, he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP.

Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation passed for the ~$1.2 trillion this will add to the national debt; the fact that he’s not doing this is pretty much proof that what’s really going on here is a good old-fashioned vote-buying scheme dressed up with some fancy language to make it seem less like the crime it is.

The New York Times described last week how foreign investors and allies are getting cold feet about the U.S. economy. Every other day, Trump imposes another nonsensical tariff, threatens the rule of law, lies about Iran, and remains clueless about how these actions affect the economy.

The Trumpapalooza midterm convention in Dallas, staged to spin the disastrous results of Trump 2.0 into ‘The Great American Comeback,’ confirmed Trump’s economic ineptitude. Speaker after speaker praised him so lavishly that the convention looked like his made-for-TV Cabinet meetings, as Trump used his podium time to strut his ignorance.

There are plenty of ways to exercise power in Washington. Pass legislation. Kill legislation. Twist arms. Control committees. Bury investigations. Force votes. Block votes.

And then there’s Mike Johnson’s preferred method:

A man with a third grader’s intellect says all we need to regulate AI is a smart president. The same guy who will bark ‘hoax! hoax! hoax!’ at climate change while Mar a Lago takes on water now insists that efforts to regulate AI are also a hoax.

If Americans listen to this barking clown instead of scientists, engineers, and AI developers, we truly have entered Idiocracy — and we will get the killer robots we deserve.

I heard once, not sure where, but it sticks in my head, that a junior writer asked legendary Chicago-based columnist Mike Royko how he was able to write a column every single day. He replied something to the effect of, “Write about what makes you angry.”

I think about that anecdote often — actually, all the time. It is damn hard sometimes to figure out not just what makes you mad, but what makes you the maddest, since there are so many things coming from the Trump administration that boil the blood.

Last Friday, for the first time in American history, a brand new court in America deported Nazira Haji Zada, a 47-year-old lawful permanent resident living in Fort Worth, to Afghanistan. She was never charged with a crime, and wasn’t allowed to see the evidence against her (and neither were her lawyers). Attorney General Todd Blanche called the whole thing “a win for national security and the rule of law.”

This was possible because, in a moment of national hysteria following the Tim McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City in the 1990s, Congress authorized the creation of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, something so counter to normal American concepts of the rule of law and fair play that no president before now had been willing to use it.

God, the list of terrible Trump Cabinet appointees (and other positions) is as endless as the number of jobs themselves — though that's to be expected when the first, maybe only, requirement is unrequited love, along with unwavering and public support of Donald Trump as president and person.

Bessent, Blanche, Patel, Noem — one could go on and on. And yet the worst still holds his job, perhaps because Trump doesn't fire white males, perhaps because Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth actually does efficiently and perfectly perform the real task before him — pandering to Trump and persecuting those he believes deserve it — while failing at all others.