The closest American corollary to the how Islamic fanatics respond when you insult the Prophet Muhammad might be how The Wall Street Journal editorial page responds when you insult Ronald Reagan.1 And when Trump slandered The Gipper by saying that Reagan “loved” tariffs, the Journal responded with the stuffy newspaperman version of a fatwa. They said that Trump was wrong about Reagan’s views on trade and chided him for “taking Reagan’s trade beliefs in vain.” I don’t think the Journal will take things any further, but if I was in the Secret Service and saw Paul Gigot in line for a Trump event, I wouldn’t hesitate to order a full-body cavity search.
Trump defended his evidence-averse interpretation of Reagan’s views using an excuse that we all knew would happen at some point: Trump said that the Reagan video was AI. The situation in a nutshell — for those of you who have been wasting your lives raising your kids or enjoying the fall weather instead of obsessively dissecting Trump’s every utterance — is this: The government of Ontario made an ad that used video of Reagan criticizing tariffs. The ad accurately represented Reagan’s words — you can hear the whole five-minute speech here — but Trump called the add a “FRAUD” and announced a 10 percent tariff on Canadian goods in a fit of pique. And next week, the Trump administration will argue before the Supreme Court that the court should ignore Trump’s words and affirm the laughably false pretext that Trump is imposing tariffs in response to an “emergency”, but I digress.
It was inevitable that a dishonest politician would wave away damning evidence by claiming that the evidence was AI-generated (and it was all-but-inevitable that the politician would be Trump). The Reagan video is not AI-generated, as proved by the fact that in the video, Reagan has exactly ten visible fingers, and also by the fact that the video runs for five minutes without featuring a sexy Japanese cartoon woman fucking an octopus. Nonetheless, Trump said it was AI. This is one of the scenarios that people feared, but this demonstrates why I actually do not fear AI “misinformation” all that much.