Trump's Week in Comedy Gold: Super Intelligence, Granite Diplomacy and Airline Branding

this week the president of the united states decided artificial intelligence is poorly named and should henceforth be called super intelligence last week we said the jokes write themselves this week they started writing in all caps and demanding a better agent this is getting out of hand the super rebrand apparently came after a very productive meeting with chinese president xi jinping they had a whole state dinner they toured the white house and the big takeaway according to the official readout from our president she has great interest in granite yes granite like countertops the world's two largest economies meeting to discuss kitchen remodels i guess global supply chains start at home depot now then on truth social

he celebrated this diplomatic success by posting a picture of an air china plane with the slogan only trump photoshopped onto it you cannot make this up it's like putting a ford tough sticker on a toyota it's nationalist branding on the other nation's airline perfect no notes he also took a moment to remind everyone he won a past election in a giant landslide claiming 86% of the counties a statistic he appears to have invented while waiting for a commercial break to end he blamed cnn and msnbc for having poor ratings because they refused to air his magnificent arrival with she oh yeah that's why their ratings are bad definitely that and finally a quick save the

world moment he promoted an epa rollback that he claims will save $310,000,000,000 just a nice round number no specifics just rooting out waste fraud and abuse the three horsemen of any press release where you don't actually have the details alright let's unpack this because you have to if you don't you'll start to think you dreamed it all first the granite the president of china flies halfway around the world the geopolitical chessboard is set for the most important meeting of the year and the big news is granite he likes granite this is the political equivalent of your dad meeting your new partner for the first time and the only thing he says afterwards is well they've got a firm handshake it tells you absolutely nothing or it tells you everything is granite a code word is it about building materials for something a wall perhaps or did president xi genuinely look at the white house architecture and think you know a nice quartz composite would really open up this space we have officially gone from cold

war espionage to hgtv negotiation and i for one am not ready which brings us to super intelligence oh this is my favorite part after this geologically focused summit trump announces that everyone agreed with him everyone that artificial intelligence is a bad name the new far more accurate and important name is super intelligence he even added that would be super with an exclamation point he's not just the president he's his own hype man he's the guy in the comment section of his own post typing this this is a pattern right we've seen this before trump stakes trump water trump university it's the belief that you can make something better just by putting your name on it or in this case by putting a bigger louder adjective in front

of it why stop at ai why not super taxes or super diplomacy the super space force it sounds like a saturday morning cartoon and maybe that's the point it's not about the substance it's about the sizzle it's about making everything sound like the biggest best most incredible thing you've ever heard the best part is the justification poorly and inaccurately named as if artificial intelligence was the one thing holding back progress no the problem with ai isn't the name it's the potential for a robot apocalypse calling it super intelligence doesn't fix that it just makes the robot sound more confident while they're taking our jobs so what does it all add up to where does a

week of granite giant landslides and super intelligence leave us it leaves us in a world where branding has officially defeated reality where the adjective is more important than the noun the slogan on the plane matters more than whose plane it actually is this week sets up the final act of that philosophy it's not about governing anymore it's about narrating it's about creating a universe of super winds and magnificent events even if the only evidence is a post you wrote yourself so get ready because the policy might be debatable but the branding is now mandatory and everything from now on is gonna be super