Since President Donald Trump displays a ferocious disdain for any suggestion he could be wrong about anything, I hope he will not try to consult the artificial intelligence fact-checker he has unleashed against himself.
Last week, the White House unveiled America.gov, a search tool it declared to be no less than “the unified digital front door to the Federal Government.”
This gizmo, a White House news release said, will usher in a “fundamentally different relationship between the people and the Federal Government, defined by simplicity, speed, accuracy, security and respect for the individual.”
Type “America.gov” in a web browser and you’re ushered to a simply designed chatbot that offers to help you find government information and interact with administrative agencies.
Speaking to the press, Trump adjudged it to be “damn good.”
After test-driving the chatbot, reporters were inclined to agree, finding it did a pretty good job at debunking Trump’s oft-repeated falsehoods on topics such as election fraud, tariffs, inflation, illegal immigration, climate change and, perhaps most painfully for Trump’s ego, who won the 2020 election.
A New York Times report, for example, found the chatbot contradicted Trump’s contention that foreign companies bear the cost of import tariffs. It is, in fact, America.gov confirmed, American consumers who do so.
The chatbot also contradicted Trump’s claims about U.S. election fraud. Our elections are generally safe, it said, and fraud prosecutions are exceedingly rare. It also punctured Trump’s exaggerations of illegal border crossings during President Joe Biden’s administration and his doubletalk on the current rate of consumer inflation.
Americans who regularly buy groceries or fill their gas tanks don’t need a chatbot to debunk many of Trump’s claims. But other issues are more complicated, requiring reference to nonpartisan and unbiased authorities, such as the Congressional Budget Office. It’s nice to know that America.gov cited the CBO when the Times reporter asked about Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act, confirming that the law will add trillions to the deficit and “cause more than 10 million people to lose their health insurance.”
It even agreed that the law “on average made the poorest people in America even poorer and the richest people in America even richer.”
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Considering how pointedly the chatbot underscores talking points the Democrats have been trying to make all along, searchers have been bemused to find the chatbot says it avoids answering questions it deems political.
But it supports some of Trump’s proclamations when it can cite an official government source to do so.
For example, the chatbot calls what most of us have known as the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America (formerly the Gulf of Mexico).”
The website’s answers are based on published government sources, the site says, and its FAQ page invites users to “review those sources yourself.”
One wonders how long such candor will last on the America.gov page, although Trump’s ability to enchant his followers has depended more on the bright lights of television cameras and the algorithms of social media than on the well-sourced reports in the print media.
Still, the Democrats cannot hide their relief at seeing Trump’s new chatbot as a providential generator of talking points.
“Finally, a straight answer from someone in the Trump administration,” wrote Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, along with a screenshot of America.gov saying that Trump lost the 2020 election.
You may recall how Schiff has routinely asked Trump’s judicial nominees at confirmation hearings to affirm the 2020 election results. Some of the nominees meekly declined to give a straight answer, apparently out of fear of incurring Trump’s wrath over any admission that Biden’s election was legitimate.
If you’re a Republican who wants to remain employed in Trump’s Washington, you need to show absolute loyalty to the president, even if that means denying the plain truth.
Can facts compete with the MAGA wall of denialism? We’ll find out in the coming midterm elections and the presidential contest that follows.
Email Clarence Page at [email protected].
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