Surviving Trump: Trump Loves Kim Jong Un, Hates AI Regulation, And More [Op-Ed]

Welcome back for another episode of Surviving Trump, our regular column where we try to figure out how President Donald Trump is even surviving without a single functioning brain cell in his thick, loose, wig-covered head, as we run through a list of his most recent blunders and displays of abject incompetence, idiocy, and corruption.

So, let’s get into it…

I Love Dictators And Dictators Love Me, Not That I’m A Dictator Or Anything Like That

Here’s the thing: Trump doesn’t even stand on his own business, and if his supporters weren’t such dedicated cultists who fall for anything because, much like their president, they stand for nothing, they might raise a MAGA-fied eyebrow or two every time they see Trump making nice with someone who, by all accounts, should be an enemy.

For example, while we know that MAGA Republicans don’t actually know what communism is, they should at least be aware that China is a communist nation, and even if they didn’t know that, they know Trump can’t go more than an hour or so without reflexively calling any and all of his political rivals communists, and that he has spent the last couple of years talking about China like it backed over his favorite childhood dog in the driveway. And that should have them appropriately confused about why Trump was so buddy-buddy with Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping during Xi’s White House visit last week. Just like they might be confused about Trump fawning over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as if he’s not attacking the good mayor as a communist, socialist, America-hating Muslim when they’re not in the same room.

Likewise, Trump has spent the last several months claiming ad nauseam that the reason he forced the nation into this boneheaded, seemingly endless conflict with Iran was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, which, to date, Iran has yet to threaten anyone with or even indicate that it has one in development.

Do you know what nation has threatened nuclear warfare numerous times, and has even tested its nukes on at least six occasions? North Korea. Do you know who runs North Korea? Kim Jong Un. Do you know who recently called Kim Jong Un his “friend” and has praised the North Korean dictator in the past? You guessed it: President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, a reporter in Washington, D.C., asked Trump why North Korea could have nuclear weapons but Iran could not.

“That’s interesting. You know why? Because you had a different president, and they could have stopped him,” he said, referring to previous administrations, which still wouldn’t answer the question as to why he hasn’t moved to block North Korea’s proven nuclear capabilities the way he has tried to block Iran’s largely theoretical capabilities.

“He happens to be a friend of mine, Kim Jong Un; he’s a friend of mine. He likes Trump, doesn’t like a lot of other people. I’m about the only person in the entire world that he likes, and I like him,” he said.

I mean, this is the same man who can’t type out Barack Obama’s name without putting “HUSSEIN” in all-caps to remind his bigoted cultists that Obama shares a name with another authoritarian world leader we were once at war with. It’s also worth mentioning that he’s the same president who keeps defending himself against what he describes as a “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX,” while being a clear devotee to Russia’s authoritarian, warmongering president, Vladimir Putin, since his first term, making him — as Rep. Jasmine Crockett once put it — “Putin’s hoe.”

What’s that they say about birds of a feather?

Anyway, Trump supporters will probably say all of this Kim Jong Un praise is AI. Speaking of which…

Trump’s New AI Website Says Biden Won In 2020, And, Well, We Can’t Have That, Now Can We?

According to The Guardian, on Tuesday, Trump launched America.gov, an AI platform which the White House says will make it easier for U.S. citizens to interact with the federal government and, eventually, complete services like renewing passports and enrolling in Medicare.

The website also includes a chatbot that users can pose questions to, prompting it to spit out factual answers, or what Trump regularly refers to as “fake news.”

So, users have been asking the chatbot who won the 2020 election, which everyone who isn’t looking for dates at their family reunion knows was former President Joe Biden. And of course, the chatbot initially told users as much, which the White House is simply not having.

From Fortune:

The Trump administration has lauded its revamped website America.gov as a way to simplify Americans’ access to information and services scattered across a plethora of agency sites, but President Donald Trump probably won’t like some of the answers his new site says are sourced from government information.

Asking the site — which says it’s sourced via artificial intelligence from “official government sources” — questions about who won the 2020 election or about the name of the federal department that operates out of the Pentagon yields answers contrary to those Trump himself frequently proclaims.

As Trump was still speaking at Tuesday’s launch event, however, the site began modifying its answers. Asked again about the 2020 election, it replied that it couldn’t answer “political questions,” a response it also gave to inquiries about whether Trump had been impeached or convicted of felony charges.

Yeah — the administration definitely didn’t think this through. At some point, a staffer must have looked at the website and said, “Oh shit, we forgot AI isn’t a default MAGA sycophant like we are!”

Trump Tells Top AI Firms To ‘Self-Police’

Since earlier this month, we have been reporting on AI industry leaders and insiders, including employees and CEOs at Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, of all people,  sounding the alarm on AI technology advancing fast without proper oversight. Trump has predictably responded by calling these concerns a “hoax,” and had even gone as far as to say as much at the UN General Assembly, where he embarrassed his country by declaring before the world that he had renamed artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.”

Well, according to NPR, on Tuesday Trump said he and a large group of AI—sorry, “SI”— company leaders had signed a voluntary accord that will include internal and external reviews during a meeting at the White House aimed at addressing those companies’ fears of out-of-control technology.

“I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-police,” Trump told reporters.

The accord was reportedly signed by Trump, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Musk, most of whom had publicly spoken about how AI tech needed more regulation and outside oversight, namely government oversight, and somehow, that has translated to “self-policing.”

From NPR:

Other experts are skeptical of putting “so much faith in self-policing,” like Robin Jia, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. Jia said it’s crucial to ensure the leading labs’ intentions are “well-aligned with the broader interest of the American public.” He pointed to the recent disclosures of hacking incidents and said: “As the models get better, the consequences of such things are only going to get greater.”

Some also took issue with the accord’s vague, broad language. Alex Pascal, executive director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said: “The only way to reduce the risks and harms of AI to Americans is through robust legal liability, regulation and fundamentally changing the race dynamics that are driving unsafe decision-making by frontier AI developers whose costs are borne by the American people.”

Trump doesn’t want AI to be regulated, but, apparently, someone in his camp has pulled him aside and told him he at least needs to appear as if he’s doing something to address the concerns of literal AI experts who say regulation is badly needed. And so we get an accord that essentially says AI companies can regulate themselves.

Trump is, by far, the most pretending-to-do-something-by-doing-nothing-or-by-making-things-worse-ass president in any of our lifetimes.

Sad.

Wait, Damn, Even Ken Paxton Wants Off The Trump Train Now?

We knew it was bad for campaigning MAGA Republicans when even Byron Donalds — Trump’s loyal Blacky-lackey, who is currently running to become governor of Florida — was caught deleting Trump mentions from his website, because, these days, a Trump endorsement is about as useful as a butthole sewn shut. (Although Trump has a butthole in the middle of his face we all wish we could take a needle and thread to.)

Well, now, even Senate GOP nominee Ken Paxton is saying his association to the president his hurting him politically, not helping.

From the New York Times:

Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists last week that President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas had hurt Mr. Paxton politically, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.

The recording, which is muffled at times, captures Mr. Paxton being asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not clear from the audio whom the questioner is referring to.

Mr. Paxton responds: “So to be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

Whaaaaaah? You mean to tell me Trump’s “Trumpapalooza” event in Dallas backfired? Did people not believe they would become $5,000 richer the second Republicans won the midterms? Say it ain’t so!

Understand this: Paxton has, for years, been such a devoted nut-hugger to Trump that, as Texas’ attorney general, he sued Tylenol-maker Kenvue and its former parent company, Johnson & Johnson, alleging the companies deceived their consumers knowing and concealing that it could cause autism — an idea he got from Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and a single scientific review that scientists have repeatedly debunked, which is why RFK eventually had to walk his claims back.

Paxton is also a supporter of Trump’s 2020 election fraud propaganda, and is willing to sit and smile while the president mocks him to his face.

For him to say Trump’s support of his campaign has done more harm than good, well, that’s quite the sign of the times, isn’t it?

I mean, hell, will he survive Trump?