Trump’s America.gov launch event was a cringe fever dream

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There are few things more reassuring than hearing a man on a stage describe the United States government as “one source of truth” while standing beneath a giant screen at an AI conference. Welcome to America.gov, the Trump administration’s new government website, unveiled Tuesday via a downright strange event that revealed how many blind spots this administration actually has when it comes to tech.

Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder and Tesla board member who is now a senior adviser to the president (naturally), was on hand to explain the thinking. America.gov, he suggested, would be “like a hotel concierge.” But “let’s not stop there!” The glorified chatbot has been trained, Gebbia said, specifically on “one source of truth: the United States government.” This was greeted with applause.

“Let’s hear it for all the federal agencies who work hard on behalf of citizens!” he declared. More applause.

Not to sound like the rain at the corporate parade, but there is something vaguely fascistic about the idea of sweeping away previous agencies and entities and instead gathering them all under one panopticon AI system — especially when that system was designed by the business friends of the president, who are gathered in the front row for the “product launch” and who would be circulating over drinks and canapés later.

It doesn’t exactly say “guardrails” or “multiple points of failure” so much as “unwise data usage” and “big fat dangling bait for hackers.” But maybe I’m just a Luddite and a stick-in-the-mud and DOGE needs to liberate me from my multifaceted thought process.

“This isn’t about a website, it’s about changing the relationship between citizens and their government,” said Tony Robbins (yes, that Tony Robbins) a little later — a red flag of a sentence if ever I’ve heard one — because why not involve a self-aggrandizing motivational speaker in all of this?

The great American government, reimagined as a consumer product, is not what any of us asked for, but it’s what we’re getting: all the information from all the various agencies and sources of truth, gathered under one AI-driven system. And if you’re thinking that putting all of that data together in one great big, eminently hackable database sounds like a bad idea, don’t worry: Trump’s thought about this, and he said quite clearly today that America.gov probably won’t get hacked (but if it does, “because they always find a way,” they’ll just deal with it in some nebulous way, he added, as if one could un-hack hacked data.)

The president did his usual entrance to ‘God Bless The USA’, looking a lot perkier than he did during a sleepy, slurring appearance on Monday afternoon. Clearly energized by the room, he then embarked on the familiar subject of his own generosity. He doesn't take his presidential salary, he reminded everyone. He has done all these things for free. But do people thank him? No.

He compared himself, favorably, with George Washington. Then he gave a shout out to former (returning?) First Buddy Elon Musk, who appears to have weaseled his way back into the presidential orbit after a couple of high-profile spats.

Trump added that government had been broken for “many, many decades,” before expanding the diagnosis to “you could say centuries.” It’s a bold claim for a country that is itself only 250 years old, but sure. Anyway, America.gov would fix everything.

After talking about the AI underpinning the website, Trump added that we’re not saying AI anymore, of course. This is something he soft-launched during his UN General Assembly address last week: the idea that we should now all refer to AI as “super intelligence,” a term which inconveniently has its own separate meaning, but whatever.

“When you say artificial intelligence, it’s extreme intelligence, it’s supreme intelligence, it’s – uh – super intelligence,” he said today, clearly forgetting the new term mid-sentence and eventually getting back around to it via “supreme.” That’s because AI and America.gov is actually a “great, brilliant super-mind.” Cool!

Continuing to riff on artificial intelligence versus super intelligence, the president then added that “artificial intelligence is like the news: fake news. In fact I could call them artificial… I’m gonna call them artificial news!”

The room full of technology executives laughed loudly.

There is something unremittingly bleak about a group of people who have spent the past year gaining unprecedented technical control over government agencies gathering to laugh heartily together about denigrating the free press. But listen, there are snacks out in the hallway and there’ll be a roundtable after lunch.

If you’re worried about China, America’s biggest competitor, don’t worry: “I spoke to President Xi, he loves it,” said Trump. And by the way, came a complete non-sequitur, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.

“Two years ago, America was dead, and now it’s the hottest country of anywhere in the world,” he added, which is a sentence he now pulls out at every public appearance. Today, it was even further embellished: he claimed that when he met world leaders last week, “they said to me: Two years ago, your country was dead, and now you’re the hottest country of anywhere in the world.” And I suppose it’s appropriate to speak like ChatGPT when you’re onstage launching an AI product, so we’ll forgive him this one.

Then came the signing of an executive order bringing the various government agencies together for America.gov, followed by a good old-fashioned blast of ‘YMCA’. Is it a corporate team-building exercise? Is it a Series B funding pitch for a particularly uninspiring startup? Is it a “historic transformation of the American state”? Who cares!

There was time, after Trump spoke, for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to announce a new style of US passport that has “more gold on it,” a big American eagle, and a flip-book effect. He encouraged Americans to “watch the eagle as you flip through the pages. It flies!”

“It’s either this or some Gameboy for your kids,” Rubio added earnestly, as if the Trump administration had actually just invented the flip-book at the same time as inventing underwhelming chatbots that work off large datasets.

There are moments when I do feel a twinge of sympathy — or perhaps, more accurately, secondhand embarrassment — for members of this government, and that was one of those times. I felt it again when I played around with America.gov and found that it did not seem able to fulfil any of the tasks Trump and his officials had just said it would be able to do, such as allowing a person to get their passport for the first time without any in-person appointments (a huge red flag for identity fraud, by the way) and allowing someone to change their name in “one click” (not able to do that, the America.gov AI told me, although it could direct me to a number of different, complicated agency websites.)

Is it innovation, is it fascism, is it a hotel concierge, or is it completely naive foolishness in an oversized suit, celebrated by a lot of back-slapping and taxpayer money changing hands?

Whichever it is, don’t worry too much about it. Because Xi Jinping said he loves it, and the news is artificial, and the AI is super, and we’ve never been at war with Iran. Have fun, everybody! See you at the next panel, the next election, or perhaps the next world war.

Don’t forget to tip the concierge on your way out!