Adventures in the Trump Brain

Over at Techdirt, the genial Mike Masnick has come up with a brilliant explanation of what is happening when Trump does an interview like the one with Time a couple of weeks ago; it's something remarkably similar to the way a chatbot, especially the less successful-looking early models like ChatGPT itself,  handles a conversational series of prompts, with its "response generator":

1. A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
2. Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response generator
3. Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
4. The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear, rather than for accuracy or truth....

Brilliant, if maybe not exactly right. Consider Masnick's first example:

You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—

Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all, he wouldn’t do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.

We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.

Huh?

We spoke to him a year ago.

How did he do?

You can read the interview yourself.

Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn’t do well. He didn’t do well at all. He didn’t do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren’t asking him questions like you’re asking me.

(In case you’re wondering, you can see the Biden interview here and he did not cut if off after a matter of minutes).

Because he's not doing what the automaton does, saying "what he thinks his audience wants to hear" (or, more accurately, trying to assemble the string that represents the most probable response to the prompt). Unlike the automaton, he is thinking, but in this passage from late in the interview what he's thinking about is how not to respond to the prompt, an uncomfortable series of questions on the abuse of foreign students' free speech rights over the Gaza issue, which he's not enjoying and doesn't know anything about (other than the less than accurate report that there was "tremendous antisemitism at every one of those rallies"), and he leaps at the mention of Biden's name as an opportunity to change the subject to something more comfortable, the subject of how superior he is to Biden, who would never have had the courage to submit to an interview with Time, except of course it immediately turns out he did.

So he instantly switches to pretending not only that he already knew that, though he obviously didn't, but even more ridiculously that he'd actually read the transcript, bringing in the words from the prompt.

That's the part that really looks like AI, where he lies, or hallucinates, "I did read the interview", though he's just told us he's hearing about the interview for the first time. AI is unable to maintain discourse coherence over a certain distance, as in this beautiful example I saw yesterday:

I asked Google how much $1M in gold would weigh. Simple math problem. It gave the wrong answer, then the correct answer, then wrong answer again. Somehow they have broken the math ability of a mathematical machine. It’s impressive, actually.

[image or embed]

— Ross in Detroit (@rossindetroit.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 7:23 PM

Gemini's conversational rules for answering a prompt like that are evidently to state the conclusion, then show its work, then repeat the conclusion: but it doesn't "know" the conclusion before it's done the rather complicated work required for this question, and "hallucinates" an answer instead. Then, after doing the work, it doesn't "know" that it has contradicted the prefabricated conclusion. 

In a similar way, Trump has a set of prefabricated conclusions about Biden that he has been deploying for well over a year, that he's afraid of interviews and that everything he does is a failure, and when the prompts force him to switch them up, he simply does so, without showing any awareness that he's contradicting himself, and adding a kind of "hallucination" for verisimilitude, in the bit about the interview having been cut short (possibly inspired by an incident of September 2023, when a very jet-lagged Biden was giving a speech in Hanoi and his staff pulled him offstage before he was finished).

That's exactly how he maintains that tariffs will both protect the return of manufacturing industries to the US (because people will buy American dolls and pencils rather than pay the tax) and simultaneously raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue (because people will gladly pay the tax). The two concepts aren't connected for him, so they never collide, unless some mean interviewer forces the issue, like Time here telling him that the magazine did interview Biden, or Terry Moran on Kilmar Ábrego García:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don't do that -- M-S-1-3 -- It says M-S-one-three.

TERRY MORAN: I -- that was Photoshop. So let me just--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can't do that -- he had --

-- he-- hey, they're givin' you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you're doin' the interview. I picked you because -- frankly I never heard of you, but that's okay --

TERRY MORAN: This -- I knew this would come --

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you -- Terry -- but you're not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed --

TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We'll agree to disagree. I want to move on --

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.

Where Trump responds to being contradicted like a Mafia don.

And you don't necessarily need the AI concept to understand it. There's a lovely formulation by David Roth at Defector:

It is one of the defining Trump things that any belief that makes it into his mind will bump around in there forever; his understanding of the world is the sum of those things, thousands of permanent and perpetual irritants cut free from any context or facticity, smashing into each other and echoing forever inside of his luxuriously appointed skull. They drop bowling balls on the cars; there is no such thing as gold paint; they looked at his hand and the proof was right there. None of this, of course, is new. None of the beliefs are new, really, and nothing that Trump will do between this moment and his last one on earth will be new, or surprising in the least. It's just a matter of which echoes are ringing most loudly at that moment.

Just floating around his brain, from the bowling balls (probably not originating in a bizarre misinterpretation of the Nissan ad at top—the most thorough investigation I've seen is by Philip Bump, from 2018) to Kilmar Ábrego's knuckle tattoos, and all the rest.

 

What Were You Expecting?

 

Image by Nicholas Konrad for The New Yorker, from David Rohde's coverage of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, August 2022.

The defense secretary makes more use of that inadequately secured communications platform than he originally said, like to keep his missus and his brother apprised of his military activities, thus endangering national security even more than when he did this with members of the Principals Committee, plus the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic (who wasn't supposed to be there but seems to be the only person involved who had a clue on how to behave in a situation where sensitive information is being discussed). Hegseth seems extremely reliant on the missus and the brother, dragging the one of them to meetings for which she hasn't got an appropriate, or indeed any, security clearance, and appointing the other to a Pentagon sinecure, and I can't help thinking their job is to carry the hip flasks, but who knows. 

The punditry explodes with excitement: surely the president will have to fire him now, but that's not what happens when the president is informed:

Mr. Hegseth called the president around 8 p.m., said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers.

As far as Trump is concerned, the problem isn't that Hegseth is a threat to national security, it's that disgruntled leakers let everybody know about it. That's what those leakers do, probably because of whatever it was that disgruntled them. Once disgruntled, twice shy.

Indeed it might be the still gruntled ones who are the greater problem, like the White House anonymi who persuaded NPR to report that Trump was actively seeking a new defense secretary. At least the disgruntled ones are likely to be telling us the truth—that more or less everything is out of control.

Keeping Criminals Out

That line of Trump's, when I heard it on the radio—"Isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country?"—struck me as begging a couple of important and opposed questions: asking us to assume, on the one hand, that what he's been doing can be described that way, and on the other that it's an unambiguously good idea.

I've given a lot more attention to the first, especially starting in the 2024 campaign, because the shamelessness of the lying, on the part of Trump and Bannon and Stephen Miller, got me so mad, and the respectable people were hardly discussing it: that when the Trumpies screamed about the millions of criminal aliens they were planning to deport, the murderers and rapists and human traffickers and opiate dealers, the escapees from prisons and "lunatic asylums" Trump had created out of his own linguistic confusion, they weren't talking about anything real.

Waiting For Octopus City

 

Octopus City, rendering of a plan by Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute, via Wired, May 2015, when the techie billionaires were giving up on their idea. Then Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy.

Found myself unexpectedly attracted by a conspiracy theory around the tariff mishegas, from a Substacker, Daniel Pinchbeck, with an excitingly transgressive headline: Paul Krugman is wrong.

Not that I was planning to go that far myself! I think Krugman's judgment of the White House at the moment is fundamentally right:

These Are Not Serious People

 

Hey, Mom, I told you I'd finish the project in time. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, via Newsweek.

I had a pretty strong suspicion that there was some bullshit involved when I heard about the chart (at first on the radio) of Trump's proposed "reciprocal tariffs", announced on NPR as

a 10% minimum tariff to apply to goods from all countries. However, certain trading partners will face higher, "reciprocal tariffs" aimed at penalizing them for their trade barriers. Those taxes on imported goods are calculated on a country-by-country basis, and the levels Trump announced for some trading partners are substantial. He said he plans to impose 34% tariffs on China, 20% on the European Union and 24% on Japan, among an array of other trading partners.

and a little more suspicion when I saw the charts Trump put on display for illustration, which seem to be describing something different, or maybe two different things, with the left columns headed "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers", and the right column headed "U.S.A. discounted reciprocal tariffs" of around half the amount given in the first column, except for a number of countries, such as UK, Brazil, Singapore, Chile, Australia, and Colombia, where the number in both columns was 10%, which looked like a reference to the 10% "minimum tariff" instead. Why were those on the same chart? 

But the thing I really wanted to know about was where the numbers in the other cells of the left column came from: how had the administration calculated a single number for "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers" for each of the 65 countries, 67% for China, 39% for the EU, 90% for poor Vietnam? Not that I would have any ability to imagine other numbers, or even to say whether such numbers exist, but could they say something about how they did it? There are no clues in today's executive order or in the presidential memorandum to which it alludes.

Anyway, I was pleased to see that Dr. Krugman, who is probably as well positioned to talk about these subjects as anybody alive (work in international trade theory is what he won his Nobel for), put up a quick note on the Substack that has replaced his New York Time column that suggests he was wondering exactly the same thing: 

So where does this 39 percent number [representing the EU's "tariffs charged to the USA"] come from? I have no idea. Many people speculated that Trump would count value-added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t — European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.

You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers.

Now it seems, as NPR reports it, that's pretty much what happened:

Trump calls the move "reciprocal tariffs," however, the White House acknowledged it would be hard to calculate the actual trade barriers from every country, NPR's Scott Horsley tells Up First. As a result, the Trump administration picked an arbitrary number they thought would be high enough to chip away at each country's trade surplus. Economists say the tariffs will likely mean higher prices and slower growth in the U.S.

Got that? It would be hard to calculate, so they decided they'd just make the numbers up. And it's not like it was totally arbitrary, they were careful to pick numbers that sounded "high enough". Close enough for country music, as we used to say. Everybody's OK with that, right?

It was government by bullshit. They just brought their big charts with the made-up numbers out to the Rose Garden like Trump's hurricane map and read Stephen Miller's statement, with news that is I mean cataclysmic for most of these countries, threatening them all with recession, and lay back in the expectation that everybody would treat it as some kind of real thing. Presumably it's another Trumpy extortion attempt. Hey Vietnam, nice little export economy you have here, shame if anything were to happen to it, why don't you make us an offer? (Except Vietnam did make them an offer, back in February, and ambassador Marc Knapper assured them that Trump's tariffs were not going to be aimed at them in any way. Maybe President Trump wasn't informed of what President Trump was doing.) 

I'll have more to say about the whole event later on, but I feel like this thing on its own is so key to the understanding of what the Trumpery is about: they made the numbers up, because they felt getting real ones would be too hard, and admitted it to Scott Horsley, and they still expect to be treated as adults.

Update: The actual calculations are now available from various sources, including good old Atrios, Dean Baker, and The New York Times. And Krugman, with some hard evidence that the formula was created by an Large Language Model generative AI (though Gemini 3.5 is very insistent that it’s a stupid idea). Still insane, but helpful indicators of what kind of insanity.

Oh Freedom Over Me

 

In the email from rightwing poll aggregator Real Clear Politics:

Sweet Christ, Carl, you're still fretting about how four and a half years ago Twitter followed FBI advice that the New York Post's Hunter laptop story might be infected by Russian disinformation and blocked links to the Post for [checks notes] nearly three whole days, leaving users to the humiliation of having to find it on Facebook instead? 

(If it had been four days, Trump totally would have won the election? Uh, maybe a comforting thought for Trump but I really don't think so.)

Meanwhile, the Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate, what a setup for Aaron Sorkin's new series "The East Wing", serves as a propagandist. 

Maybe you'd like to say that there's no constitutional prohibition against the Executive making laws abridging the freedom of the press so there's nothing we can do about it? It's not over till it's over! Don't surrender in advance!

And the FBI was right, too, BTW; the laptop (which wasn't in fact the laptop, which seems to have been squirreled away in impenetrable FBI secrecy for years, but Rudolph Giuliani's alleged copy of its hard drive), was certainly infected by Russian disinformation from the Russia agents he worked with, Pavel Fuks, Andrij Telizhenko, Andrij Derkach, and so on, though it never made it into a criminal case against Hunter Biden anyway, largely because as evidence it was total garbage with which special prosecutor Durham could never think of anything to do. And it was never a First Amendment case even under one of the weird interpretations that are going around (social media companies were always able to, and frequently did, ignore the FBI's advice).

But whoever has ever been living in terror that a bunch of college students might "cancel" them or even be publicly rude to them really needs to wake up to the evidence of what real deprivation of freedom of speech is like, where the president's impression of wrongthink is getting people fired from their jobs in really large numbers, prevented from doing peer-approved research, prevented from curating peer-approved museum exhibitions and staging peer-approved plays and dance events and the like, fired from research jobs and medical jobs and teaching jobs or if they're students thrown out of school, or if they're foreigners thrown out and transported by midnight plane without communicating with their families or lawyers to the 21st-century equivalent of Devil's Island. Something like the McCarthy era (under the guidance of Roy Cohn's old pupils Stone, Manafort, and Trump) is really back.

I mean, the Reagan administration and the Bush II administration had the cynicism and clownishness and the violent foreign policy from South and Central America to West Africa and the Middle East and the furious push to increase economic inequality through the tax system, a democratic society really shouldn't have tolerated any of it. I'n not fighting it because I'm such a good person, I'd fighting it because they're after me. I'm not even saying it's worse now, I'm saying it's personal. 

If I should have fought it harder in the past, now I have no choice. They're really after me and my friends and family. If I should have felt the attack on everybody, now I feel it on us. If I've made fun of the cult of the Founders and their commitment to FREEDOM, because of the way they willingly denied freedom to enslaved people and women and workers and foreigners and "deviants" of one kind and another from the beginning, it's my freedom now: I've always been able to complain about the abuse I saw around me, and do a little something for others, giving a few dollars to ACLU and a candidate here and there, grousing about the reactionary views of some of my kids' teachers, writing a blog. I'm not sure even these little things can last. All freedom is threatened now, except for the freedom you can buy with huge amounts of money, like Justin Sun openly—openly!—escaping fraud charges with $400 million in bribes, or that other asshole with the fake e-vehicle, Trevor Milton. That kind of freedom works better than ever.

They want us in jail. They want suicides. And they give zero fucks about "free speech" because, you know why? Because they've got expensive speech, all you could ever desire, from the philosophical Charles Koch to the drugged-up Elon Musk. You know what I'm saying? Your freedom is absolutely in jeopardy.

Annals of Intelligence

 

Director of Central Intelligence lies to Senator Ossoff.

Unsurprisingly, Pete Hegseth's first instinct was to lie about the thing, brazenly, and about the messenger, Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, suggesting that he'd somehow made the story up:

“I've heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said shortly after landing for a layover in Hawaii on a trip to Asia.

Hegseth criticized Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides, hopes, or suckers and losers.”

“This is the guy that pedals [sic] in garbage. This is what he does,” he added.

It's true that Goldberg scooped a bunch of news about Trump's contempt for America's war dead ("Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers"), but it's not as if there were any doubt about the truth of that, given his publicly undisguised contempt for Vietnam POW John McCain, and World War II hero George H.W. Bush (shot down as a Navy pilot by Japanese), and the parents of Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, etc. And if Goldberg was an early proponent, in summer 2016, of the idea that Trump might be a "de facto" Putin agent, he plainly meant not a Putin agent—